Buckinghamshire Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) are outsourcing doctor's surgery hardware and networks to Lynx Technology.

Under the £660,000 three-year contract, 90 GP practices in 108 sites within the Buckinghamshire Primary Care division will receive managed support and services from Lynx to minimise downtime and improve efficiency.

Services include a helpdesk and onsite support for servers, desktops, IT hardware and network maintenance.

Practice hardware will be migrated onto a standard and readily supportable platform using hardware of known build, and more emphasis will be placed on practices IT risk, regarding security, disaster recovery and virus protection.

Three PCTs - Vale of Aylesbury PCT, Chiltern and South Bucks PCT and Wycombe PCT and its general practices - will get IT services from Lynx, Microsoft and Cisco Gold Partner.

Rather than GPs contracting individually with IT companies, the new contract provides potential for cost savings through economies of scale.

Kevin Garthwaite, associate director of health informatics, Vale of Aylesbury PCT, said: ‘With such a small team, providing the level of support we required posed us significant challenges.’

He says Lynx understood the ‘constraints of working in IT within the NHS but could also draw on wide experience from other sectors and was interested in developing a partnership approach to managed services.’

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