Main NPfIT contractors paid £1.2bn last year

Tags: A Accenture Atos Origin Brown BT Cerner CfH Choose and Book England Fujitsu IBA Information Infrastructure LSP N3 Network NPfIT PACS South US

27 Nov 2007

Despite continued delays in many areas of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), Connecting for Health (CfH) paid its main contractors over £1.5bn in the past financial year, with the lion's share going to its prime contractors and professional services firms.

Figures obtained by E-Health Insider under the Freedom of Information Act, show that in 2006/2007 the five lead contractors – Computer Sciences Corporation, Fujitsu, BT Global Services, together with BT Syntegra and Accenture - received a total of £1.17bn between them.

The £42m paid to ATOS Origin for the national Choose and Book service takes the total payments to principal contractors to more than £1.2bn last year. This despite very slow progress on the main NHS Care Records Service component of the programme.

The programme’s local service providers led the payments table with CSC, the LSP for the North, East and Midlands, receiving £333m; Fujitsu the LSP for the South of England received £263m; BT Global Services, the LSP in London, meanwhile was paid £216m.

The LSP payments appeared to have little direct correlation with clinical systems delivered by the LSPs, with the possible exception of picture archiving and communications systems (PACS). BT in London, for instance, had delivered only one acute hospital core patient administration system (PAS) by April 2007 – since replaced - while Fujitsu had only completed five installations of its Cerner PAS.

Accenture, which negotiated its exit from the programme as LSP for the North East and Eastern regions for all but PACS in January 2007, still received a £130m payment. Accenture virtually ceased work on hospital systems from early summer 2006, handing over to CSC.

On the main national infrastructure projects BT Syntegra, the arm of BT responsible for the N3 network and national NHS Spine, incorporating the NHS Care Records Service, received £172m.

NPfIT’s chosen clinical software vendor iSoft, since acquired by IBA Health, received a direct payment of £28m from CfH, this despite it being a sub-contractor of CSC.

Isoft told EHI the April 2006 payment relates to an Enterprise Wide Agreement signed with CfH which provided extensions to maintenance agreements and flexible termination provisions with 393 NHS trusts ahead of them joining the NPfIT.

Professional services, consulting and recruitment firms also did rather well from the NHS IT programme last year: Specialist Computing Services led the billing at £17m; ASE was on £16.4m; Deloitte received £14.7m; ATOS Consulting £8.1m above and beyond its Choose and Book billing; and Capgemini £7.5m.

Perhaps the most surprising name on the list of firms to receive more than £100k in professional services fees from CfH was the US consultants Kellogg Root and Brown (KBR), part of the US Haliburton Group. Four years ago KBR was awarded an initial three-year contract for £37m to establish the NPfIT programme management office. But after reported differences sightings of KBR have become rare. Even so they were still paid £7.2m for their troubles last year.

Readers Comments

Isoft's £28 million

27 Nov 07 11:14

I can't begin to imagine why they paid out so much directly...

(post edited by EHI)

iSOFT (IBA) deserves

elion@rediffmail.com

29 Nov 07 06:01

Hi, iSOFT is putting lot of effort to develop & deliver the product to CfH. So it deserves......

delivery

29 Nov 07 10:54

lets be clear - we, the NHS - were sold a picture of IT which was based around an INTEGRATED care record. I recall sitting through an extended process of discussion about how Ambulance systems were going to feed data to A&E while patients were in transit, GPs were going to access pacs images, consultants would have real-time access to prescribing and on and on and on....

Integration (we were told) was the added value that the LSPs brought. And lets be clear: NONE of that has been delivered. What has been delivered is yet another tranch of stand alone systems, now called 'best of breed' in an absurd attempt to get us to beleive they are somehow better than what we could have bought on the open market. And even in this much descoped world the systems are little better - in many cases worse - than the existing provision.

At least iSOFT for all their manifest faults, are actually delivering a working clinical product. What has the millions going to the LSPs bought?

re: iSOFT (IBA) deserves

30 Nov 07 09:30

If I make a lot of effort at the marathon and manage a time of 8 hours do I deserve to go to the Olympics?

I think not - of course I would make the mistake of not having some really cool animated demo's showing me coming in at under 2 hours without ever actually running.

Shocking waste

30 Nov 07 14:12

As the last comment, we are getting a less integrated vision than we were previously achieving locally, the NHS is paying far more for it, and the opportunities lost are huge.

The contractual cobwebs don't save the users from lousy performance either, eg Choose and Book.

And the LSPs and consultancies main contributions seems to be making it ever more complex and unworkable. They get paid for that ?

Achieved Nothing of Note

30 Nov 07 23:59

Just imagine what riches the NHS could have delivered if this £1.2bn had been given directly to the Trusts. Instead it goes to waste on poor performing LSP's with even poorer software offerings that have actually held the NHS back. NPfIT is now an obstacle to change.