Trust invested £794,000 in Cambio HIS

Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust paid Swedish clinical software firm Cambio £794,000 before cancelling the contract for its Cosmic IT system.

However, the trust declined to give eHealth Insider further details of the cost of the failed project to develop and deploy the hospital information system, arguing that this might prejudice a new procurement.

Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh and Cambio issued a joint statement earlier this month confirming that the contract to deploy the Cosmic system had been cancelled.

The statement said the trust and the company had completed the assessment and specification stage of the project, but had “mutually agreed not to progress with the implementation phase.”

Both said the project had been beneficial, and the trust said its investment in the programme would not be wasted, since it had “gained a greater depth of understanding of the processes involved and cost efficiencies to be gained from such a system.”

Last week, after disclosing that it had invested almost £800,000 with the company to develop the product for the UK, the trust declined to say what it had spent on the project in total.

“The trust feels that if we release details of the internal cost incurred on the HIS programme to date, that this might prejudice the procurement exercise for an implementation supplier,” it said in a statement.

However, one industry expert said the sum was likely to be substantial. “Their argument is probably that they have done a lot of work on their internal processes that is transferable and that monies paid to the supplier are low.

“In practice, much of what they have done will need to be redone with the new supplier because of different system functionality, training and so on.”

The trust decided to cancel its contract with Cambio at a 27 June trust board meeting.The deal was the Swedish company’s first major contract with the NHS when it was secured in September 2010.

Minutes from a March meeting of the trust’s HIS Data Migration Workstream reveal the trust was intending to go live with the system in A&E in October and with the patient administration system in May 2013.

A Monitor forward plan 2012-13, which went before the trust board in May, says capital expenditure on IM&T over the next three financial years was expected to be £9.4m.

The report outlines the trust’s IM&T strategy, which involves implementing the HIS programme.

It says the trust was working on developing the patient administration system, A&E and e-prescribing solutions to “fit trust requirements” and implementing the systems in phases throughout the hospital.

Risks identified at the time included: “Delays in development; developed solution not meeting needs of organisation; and changes in trust strategy meaning the solution no longer matches the trust strategy.”

The report says comprehensive user acceptance testing was being performed and the system was being benchmarked against emerging solutions on the market to test value for money.