Birmingham looks for community system

Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust is hoping to procure an electronic patient record, according to a tender notice in the Official Journal of the European Union.

The trust is looking for a supplier to provide a community wide information system to replace the two legacy patient administration systems and one child health system currently in place.

The EPR at Birmingham is expected to be a fully integrated system, providing a wide range of services, including the provision of mobile access to up to 5,000 users, and the ability to update patient records from all care settings.

The supplier will be expected to provide continual support and maintenance for the EPR over an initial period of five years, with two options to extend for a period up to a maximum of 24 months. The total cost is given as £1.4m – £1.6m.

According to the tender, any prospective supplier will have to demonstrate evidence of at “least one operational PAS installation in an acute facility in the UK using the same software as to be proposed to the trust.”

Birmingham has recently applied for foundation status. As a trust in the North, Midlands and East, would have been waiting for the delivery of Lorenzo from its local service provider, CSC, as part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

However, NPfIT is now nearing its conclusion, and CSC and the Department of Health are still locked in negotiations about a new LSP deal for the NME. Any new deal is likely to lead to a scaled-back version of Lorenzo and a lower volume commitment for the region.

A spokesman for Birmingham Community Healthcare said: “As part of our continuing commitment to developing an infrastructure to support the development of high quality services for our patients, we are inviting tenders locally from suppliers wishing to support us in implementing a fully electronic, integrated patient record system.”

The deadline for receipt of tenders or requests to participate is 24 May.