London framework winners announced

The winners of a massive London framework contract for an electronic patient record system, portal, and hosting have been announced.

A tender, worth between £250m and £400m, was placed in February last year by seven (formerly nine) London trusts that were running Cerner Millennium or that planned to go-live with the system under NPfIT contracts.

EHI reported in March that Cerner, InterSystems and Epic had been shortlisted for the patient administration system/EPR lot of the tender.

John-Jo Campbell, chief information officer at St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust, confirmed this and said the framework contracts for the portal have been awarded to CGI (formerly Logica), Harris and Orion.

For hosting, the contracts have gone to Capita Clinical Solutions, Cerner and HP.

Barts Health; Croydon Healthcare; Imperial College Healthcare; Kingston Healthcare; Royal Free Hampstead; South London Healthcare; and St George’s Healthcare NHS trusts all need a replacement EPR for the end of their contracts in October 2015.

Campbell said tenders were received in November and December 2012 and were evaluated during the first quarter of 2013, with framework contracts finalised and signed progressively over the past three months.

“Each trust will now run a local procurement process to decide which solutions best meet their needs, and a trust-specific contract will be put in place. This will be completed during the remainder of 2013,” he said.

Barts Health has already announced that it plans to stick with Cerner for its EPR beyond 2015.

Before moving ahead with Millennium, Whipps Cross University Hospital, which merged with Barts and Newham University Hospital in April 2012, will be moved on to the system under an NPfIT contract.

“While a key element of setting up the frameworks was to allow trusts to place their own contracts, the trusts continue to work closely together to ensure lessons are learned and shared as each trust progresses through its local procurement process,” Campbell told EHI.

“The trusts are also working very closely with the Health and Social Care Information Centre, who continue to play a critical role in managing the current LSP providers to support a smooth and controlled end of their current contract in 2015.”