The NHS is paying BT an additional £500m to cover work being carried out in the south of England as part of the £12bn National Programme for IT (NPfIT) project.
Health minister Ben Bradshaw confirmed that BT has taken over four new patient record systems implementations that used to be run by Fujitsu before it quit the programme when negotiations over a 10-year £896m collapsed.
BT has also taken over the ongoing running of a number of systems already installed across eight Trusts and smaller systems installed at 25 mental health and community Trusts. It was already running the project in the London area.
“An extra £546m seems a hefty price tag for these limited additions,” said Ovum analyst Tola Sargeant. “The price is evidence of a number of things. Firstly, that BT underpriced the contract originally. In its haste to secure a landmark IT services deal, BT underestimated the challenge the London LSP contract represented.”
“Secondly, that the vendor had NHS Connecting For Health [the agency overseeing the project] over something of a barrel during contract renegotiations. As one of just two remaining LSPs, BT’s very public threat to walk away from the contract carried real weight,” Sargeant said.
Had BT walked away, Sargeant believes, the NHS project would have faced a bleak future.
The hugely ambitious project aims to turn a legacy patchwork of 5,000 different computer systems into a single infrastructure that connects nearly half a million healthcare professions.
It has been beset by a spiralling costs and criticisms about its reliability and the time it is taking to complete, with parts of the project running four years late.
In January 2009, The Commons Public Accounts Committee, a cross-party public spending watchdog, criticised the delays and said that the NHS should be given no longer than six months to get effective care record systems into acute trusts, after which the Department of Health should begin seeking alternatives.
