North Of England NHS Buyers Name IT Consultants Who Got In On £200m Framework Deal

Deloitte, Atos, and Phoenix Software are among the 29 organisations who've been picked to provide a whopping £200m worth of IT consultancy services to the National Health Service in the north of England.

With a name like your second-favourite indie band, the North of England Commercial Procurement Collaborative (NOE CPC) has awarded the six-lot contract to a long list of familiar and not-so-familiar names in the hopes of improving IT support for clinical and non-clinical work.

The buyers' group of NHS trusts first launched the tender in July, with the idea of building a framework for professional services and consultancy support in acute trusts, community hospitals, clinical commissioning groups, and other healthcare settings.

The contract is set to run for two years, with two optional 12-month extensions.

The maximum £200m value is split evenly between six lots, aimed at clinical information systems, non-clinical information systems, IT infrastructure, digital and innovation, auxiliary ICT consultancy services, and multidisciplinary ICT healthcare consultancy.

Many of the winning suppliers bid for more than one lot. In addition to the aforementioned consultancies and reseller, other suppliers include the Faculty of Clinical Informatics, Health Systems Support, Ideal Health Consultants, Nautilus Consulting, and SynApps Solutions as well as the big names, the Department of Health and Social Care's joint venture with Sopra Steria, NHS Shared Business Services, and the cross-government and private-sector group, NHS North of England Commissioning Support Unit.

The procurement is open to NOE CPC members, including 30 NHS organisations listed on the tender notice, from Goole in Yorkshire to the Isle of Man, which is a self-governing British Crown dependency.

Backed by £4.7bn funding, the current ambition in the NHS is to achieve "a core level of digitisation by 2024" when important information will be routinely available to clinicians when and where they need it.

The IT shopping spree includes a £500m everything-and-the-kitchen-sink framework for resellers. ®