First NHS contracts to go to Accenture and BT

Suppliers BT and Accenture have won £2.7bn-worth of deals in the first wave of contracts making up the National Programme for NHS IT.

BT Syntegra won two of the three 10-year deals - a £620m contract to develop the national patient care records systems at the heart of the programme, and the £996m Local Service Provider (LSP) contract for implementation of national systems in the London region. Accenture won the £1.1bn LSP deal for the North East region.

BT's success was at least partly down to its confidence in the programme's rigorous timetable, Richard Granger, director general of NHS IT, told Computing.

'One of the means by which BT generated confidence within the organisation was by continuing software development activity after the "proof of solution" exercise,' he said.

'BT's compliance with our functionality and timescale requirements is likely to be because they continued to work. Other bidders kept their teams in place but BT made a significant investment, at their risk, and other bidders may not have had as much confidence in their delivery commitments,' he said.

Despite rumours of draconian terms and conditions imposed on suppliers, Granger says the negotiations included significant compromises on both sides.

'There has been a deal of compromise but all our initial principles were achieved. Some of the control mechanisms are not as ferocious as they were when they were first drafted and we also clarified our requirements around continuity and service provision,' he said.

There are three further LSP deals due to be signed before Christmas. Granger says the procurement process will be completed on time but internal reviews may push the formal announcement until the New Year.

With the deals signed, the main focus will be forming effective relationships with suppliers, mobilising the NHS to receive new services and communicating with the people who will ultimately use them, says Granger.

'The next big things are the successful roll out of ebooking next summer and the elements of the care records system that follow, the completion of the designs around eprescriptions and the roll out of broadband network connections,' he said.