IT vendors bag share of £2bn NHS IT contracts

Four new IT suppliers are to bag a share of the £2bn NHS IT contracts for the North East and Eastern regions of the country as part of a deal with Accenture.

Accenture won the two Local Service Provider (LSP) contracts, which are valued at £1.1bn and £973m respectively, in December 2003.

As part of those deals Accenture is responsible for designing, implementing and operating the new IT infrastructure required in those regions to integrate with the national electronic patient record system.

Accenture has now signed deals with Cognos, EMC Documentum, First DataBank Europe and Informatica for some of that technology.

Cognos will supply a web services-based reporting tool for assessing disease trends, bed availability and waiting lists and EMC Documentum will supply Accenture with content management services covering everything from doctors' notes to MRI scans and x-rays.

First DataBank Europe will provide software that warns of potential adverse effects of drugs at the point of care, while Informatica software will be used to enable faster and easier access to various legacy systems that track patient data for the electronic care records system.