Final £896m NHS care records contract goes to Fujitsu

Fujitsu Services has won the final regional £896m NHS electronic care records contract – leaving EDS empty-handed in its bids for various parts of the £5bn NHS IT modernisation programme.

The Fujitsu Alliance will run the contract until 2013 for the local systems and services to access and use the national NHS care records service in the Southern region.

A BT consortium will develop and run the 'data spine' for the national care records system, which will be supported by infrastructure at the regional level by local service providers (LSP). BT, Accenture and CSC have already been awarded contracts for London, the North East, the Eastern region and the North West and Midlands.

The failure to win any of the NHS contracts will undoubtedly be a blow to EDS' hold on the UK public sector following the Inland Revenue's decision to dump the company in the bidding for its £3bn IT outsourcing contract. Fellow consortium partner LogicaCMG will also be disappointed as will rival bidders SchlumbergerSema and Cerner.

Director general of NHS IT, Richard Granger, said in a statement that the delay in awarding the final contract was down to longer negotiations for a better price.

He said: "It became clear that in the Southern cluster there was still scope for improvement around affordability and terms and conditions to bring the three offers available in line with those secured for the other clusters. Our prudent approach in taking a little extra time to award the contract has been vindicated by the value for money position secured with the award of this contract."

Health secretary John Reid said the care records service is a vital part of the modernisation of the NHS.

"Currently, our hospitals hold millions of paper records that have to be manually retrieved when patients need treatment or see a consultant. In the 21st century, this is clearly not an efficient way to store health information," he said in a statement.

A deal has also been signed with Oracle that will allow the NHS to standardise on a single, secure database infrastructure that the government claims will save the health service up to £100m.