McKesson committed to ESR – to 2015

The managing director of UK Workforce Solutions for McKesson has said the company is committed to supporting the NHS Electronic Staff Record until its contract it expires in November 2015.

But Frank Rutley has told EHI that running such a major piece of infrastructure is no longer “core business” for the company, which is why it will not be bidding.

Instead, he said it will be focusing on services to help trusts link workforce and other data to improve staffing and to help the NHS to meet the financial and quality challenges facing it.

“I have been involved with the ESR for a long time,” he said from McKesson’s stand at the NHS Confederation conference. “I am incredibly proud of it, but it is no longer part of our core strategy, and we are now focusing on other things.”

The ESR was one of the first, big IT projects to be implemented across the NHS, and replaced a myriad of HR and payroll systems in use at individual trusts.

The Department of Health is currently looking for a supplier to take over the ESR and implement some additional services.

It issued a notice in the Official Journal of the European Union in December 2013, inviting companies to complete a pre-qualification questionnaire. This process is now complete, and the DH is expected to announce a preferred bidder this summer.

However, it emerged earlier this week, when McKesson announced the sale of most of its International Operations Group to the Californian venture capital fund Symphony Technology Group that, although McKesson would be retaining its workforce business, it would not be bidding for the contract.

In a statement, it said it would continue to “operate as usual” while the DH completed the tender process, and “ensure a smooth transition” to the new operator.

Asked about some of the projects that the retained workforce business would be focusing on, Rutley discussed the workforce innovation service that his team runs, which enables trusts to crunch workforce data with staff and patient opinion information, to identify opportunities to change services.

“It is very much about working with NHS staff and patients, instead of doing things to them,” he said.

The businesses that McKesson is selling to Symphony include the System C software and implementation business that it bought two years ago, and Liquidlogic, the social care systems provider.

Symphony is also buying some software operations in France and the Netherlands. However, its digital imaging business in the UK is not affected.