Southern trusts paid £27m tech funding

More than £27 million in central funding has been paid to 19 NHS trusts and organisations as part of the Southern Local Clinical Systems Programme.

A Freedom of Information request by Digital Health News reveals that a further £60 million is expected to be paid out over the next four years, with some acute trusts yet to have their business cases approved.

Digital Health News reported in June 2013 that more than £80 million in central funding would be made available to trusts in the South of England to invest in clinical IT systems. This would be matched with £100 million in local funding.

The organisations involved in the SLCS programme include community and child health providers, acute trusts and ambulance trusts that did not receive any systems under the National Programme for IT.

An FOI request sent to the Health and Social Care Information Centre shows that to date, £27 million in payments have been made to 19 providers under the  programme.

“The anticipated remaining funding requirement for the SLCS programme between now and March 2019 is £60.29m. Funding will be released to NHS provider organisations at point of need in line with approved business cases, contracts and agreed implementation plans,” the response says.

The remaining funding will go mainly to the acute programme, which was the last to be approved and is the costliest.

There are six collaborative groups in the acute programme, of which three have had their business cases approved and eight trusts have already received around £8 million in funding, according to the HSCIC response.

The SmartCare collaboration of Gloucestershire Hospitals and Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts along with Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust is the most ambitious of the projects with plans to implement InterSystems’ electronic patient record TrakCare

East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust and Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust will implement the Allscripts patient administration system and a maternity system from EuroKing.

Western Sussex Hospitals and Queen Victoria Hospitals NHS Foundation Trusts and East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust are expecting to receive funding for their EDM and portal project, however Western Sussex told Digital Health News it has not yet chosen a supplier.

One of the remaining three groups, called the EDM collaborative, also announced earlier this month that it has been successful in attracting £10 million in government funding for its project. Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust and Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Trust have chosen Kainos Evolve and Hugh Symons to deliver an electronic document management system.

Community and child health was the first of the southern programmes to be approved and roll-out of the chosen system, TPP’s SystmOne, started in November 2013.

Nine community and child health providers in the South are now live  have been paid nearly £12 million for the deployment. The total project is reportedly worth £32 million, of which £20 million will be funded centrally.

Two ambulance trusts, South Western and South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trusts have also been paid more than £7.5 million to implement the Ortivus EPR.

The system was due to be rolled out from February this year, but this has been delayed until July.