Cambridge and Papworth trusts team up for e-hospital tender

Trusts' joint tender includes tablets, virtualisation and cloud implementations for common technology platform

Cambridge University Hospital and Papworth NHS Foundation Trust are working together to procure and implement an e-hospital IT infrastructure, according to a tender published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU).

The two organisations are looking to create a common technology platform and integrate their clinical and hospital management systems.

"Both trusts are committed to a convergent IT strategy that will ensure the current in-house infrastructure evolves from a static, one application per device approach to a dynamic infrastructure, where the network, servers, storage and applications are considered as a whole and managed and provisioned jointly to ensure security integration at every level," said the tender.

Initial bidding from suppliers will begin this week and further short listing exercises will take place in September.

The scope of the implementation looks vast, where the hospitals are looking to integrate their patient administration systems, scheduling, bed management, order communications, electronic patient records, materials management, device-tracking and clinical decision support.

The tender also indicates that the e-hospital will make use of virtualised servers and procure productivity tools such as email from the cloud.

Cambridge and Papworth are also looking to implement a number of mobile devices and tablets, although it is not specified for what purpose.