NME exit plans less risky with year left

The number of clinical IT deployments at risk of missing the July 2016 deadline for being moved from national to local contracts in the North, Midlands and East has halved over the past month.

Alex Chaplin, programme head at the Health and Social Care Information Centre, who is leading the exit and transition from CSC local service provider contracts, said the number of deployments classified as 'red' on its red, amber, green scale of risk stands at 125, down from more than 200 in June.

The migration is being carefully monitored, because the HSCIC warned at EHI Live 2014 last November that the migration off the contracts placed during the era of the National Programme for IT in the NHS was a “huge risk”, with 266 organisations and 216 trusts impacted in some way.

Chaplin, who was speaking at an event hosted by NHS Shared Business Services in Birmingham, phrased this as 765 deployments, of which 396 are now ‘amber’ and 244 ‘green’.

The risk scale for all the deployments being off national contracts on time is based on several criteria, including the type of system involved, and the procurement path being taken by a healthcare provider.

NHS SBS has put together a framework contract for clinical systems that is primarily aimed at trusts in the NME. But trusts can also choose to run their own OJEU procurements.

“These figures tell us you are getting on with it,” said Chaplin. However, he stressed that the HSCIC is recommending that procurement activities are completed by 31 December, to allow for data migration.

CSC became the local service provider for the whole of the NME after Accenture pulled out of the national programme in 2006. The company was contracted to provide the Lorenzo electronic patient record system, developed by iSoft, which it later bought, to healthcare communities across the three regions.

When this was hit by development and deployment delays, it implemented a large number of ‘interim’ systems to trusts. In the acute sector, these included the older iSoft iPM and iCM administration and clinical suites, and related systems, such as the Ormis theatre system.

Chaplin warned trusts that are yet to make headway that they should not expect any leeway. He told the NHS SBS event that the Department of Health has indicated it “has no appetite for any extension”.

However, he indicated that extra support could be provided for organisations working in the community sector that have yet to start procurement. 

The HSCIC and NHS SBS are considering a collaborative procurement process for these providers. Chaplin said this approach could reduce costs for providers, while suppliers could benefit from only have one set of negotiations.

While stressing the urgency of the move off interim contracts, Chaplin also urged organisations to consider how they could use modern IT to deliver some of the efficiency savings demanded by the ‘Five Year Forward View’ plan to bridge a £30 billion funding gap by 2020-21.

He said that the HSCIC estimates that the implementation of an EPR in acute trusts can yield between £3 million and £12 million in cash and non-cash releasing efficiency benefits per trust per year.

For community trusts the figure is between £1.5 million and £4 million and for mental health organisations it is between £2 million and £4 million. This value is dependent on several factors, such as the size of the organisation and the local capacity and capability for change.

As a whole, the optimised use of EPR across acute community and mental health trusts across England can have cash releasing benefits of between £900 million and £1.2 billion by 2020-21, Chaplin argued.

This is based on evidence the HSCIC has obtained from an analysis of achievements of the trusts involved in national contracts as well as what trusts have done with the various technology funds and nursing technology funds.