Six in line for £600m Leicester deal

University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust is looking at a shortlist of six suppliers for a hugely ambitious strategic and commercial partnership worth £600m over 15 years.

The trust issued a tender notice last November saying that it was looking for a partner to “support the delivery of world class information management and technology services”, implement a new electronic patient record, and “form a commercial arrangement to deliver services to other organisations.”

Leicester is completing the final ‘invitation to tender’ phase of the procurement process and anticipates having a partner in place by the end of August.

A spokesperson told eHealth Insider: “We [issued] a pre-qualification questionnaire, for which there were over 70 expressions of interest. We then shortlisted the applications down to six bidders to take through to the next stage.”

If it was delivered in full, the framework deal would see the trust spending £40m a year on IT, which is is significantly higher than its current spend, which the EHI Intelligence NHS Trust Database puts at £8.5m in 2011-12.

However, the trust’s IT strategy and the tender document that followed it make clear that the trust is not only looking to use IT to transform its services but to generate money from the new venture.

The spokesperson said: “The £600m contract value is based around delivering a series of improvements. As with all projects of this type, the value is set to cover a wide range of eventualities, which if they were all delivered would come to the value.”

The statement adds: “A key part of the £600m value is the intent to work with the partner to develop a commercial arrangement that will enable us to take advantage of our significant intellectual capital and their delivery experience to deliver IT services to other organisations.”

University Hospitals of Leicester has well publicised financial problems. Its annual plan for 2011-12 says that an underlying deficit, limited options for growth, and the need to generate a surplus to achieve foundation status means that it needs to make £38m of cost improvement plan savings; while receiving £12m of ‘transitional support’ from other parts of the NHS.

“The size of the challenge facing [the trust] for 2011-12 is therefore very substantial,” the plan says. The £38m of CIPS represents 5.5% of the trust’s turnover.

University Hospitals of Leicester issued an IT strategy in November 2011. This is extremely critical of the services and systems currently in use.

It says the trust faces: “a plethora of IM&T challenges; technical, financial, changing clinical need and a large potential programme of replacing obsolescent equipment and systems.”

The strategy says the trust – which would have been due to receive Lorenzo from the National Programme for IT in the NHS – has been falling behind other healthcare organisations that have made significant investments in EPRs and other new technologies.

To make sure it is fully prepared for the delivery of an EPR, the strategy identifies three early steps to start the move from a paper based system of working to an electronic based system.

These steps are to: “Deploy electronic prescribing and medicines administrations software, develop a clinical portal and develop an electronic document and records management system.”

EHI reported that it took the first step back in December, when it chose iSOFT’s electronic prescribing and medicines management system.

The trust wants to move to an ‘integrated’ EPR by April 2016, doing away with the ‘best of breed’ approach that has left it with more than 100 disparate supported systems and several hundred unsupported ones.

The strategy recognises the trust is on a “difficult journey." However, the tender expresses confidence that by finding the right partner the trust will be able to “successfully deliver IT enabled change”, make sure it is getting value for money from IM&T services” develop a commercial relationship “for the financial benefit of both parties.”