LSP Clusters Shortlist Announced

The National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the NHS has announced its shortlist of Local Service Providers (LSPs) selected to compete for five contracts to carry out the government’s £2.3 billion transformation of health service IT in England.

The same announcement also officially confirmed the three shortlisted bidders for the contract to be the National Application Service Provider (NASP) of the Integrated Care Records Service (ICRS) and the core national information repository called the ‘NHS Spine’.

For the LSPs there will be a total of five contracts awarded and a maximum of five LSPs, though individual LSPs could potentially win more than one cluster. The LSP bidders, shortlisted against the geographical clusters in which the successful bidder will work, are:

London

• BT, IBM, Lockheed

North East, Yorkshire and the Humber
• Cerner, Patient First Alliance, Accenture

South East and South West
• PlexusCare, Fujitsu, Lockheed, Schlumberger

East of England and East Midlands
• Accenture, Cerner, CGEY, PlexusCare

West Midlands and North West
• BT, CSC, IBM, Fujitsu, Patient First Alliance.

The Patient First Alliance consortium is led by Jarvis and Saic, while the PlexusCare consortium is led by EDS and Logica CMG.

The NASP shortlist, meanwhile, consists of three names: BT, IBM and Lockheed.

Announcing the cluster shortlists, director-general of IT, Richard Granger, said: "We were very pleased by the quality of the submissions from shortlisted suppliers. It is encouraging that the IT sector is able to respond so positively to the quality and competency requirements of the NHS.

The NHS IT boss added: “These suppliers and their sub-contractors represent a powerful and competitive mixture of indigenous, European and global experience.”

The NPfIT reconfirmed that contracts for the two first wave clusters – London, and North East, Yorkshire and the Humber – will be awarded by the end of October. The three remaining cluster contracts contracts are to be awarded by the end of this calendar year. Mr Granger is on record as saying that contracts will be awarded by Christmas – "or there will be no Christmas."

The shortlisting process involved NPfIT team members evaluating more than 40,000 pages of submissions from longlisted suppliers in five weeks. The shortlist announcement said that 120 people from across the NHS were involved, 117 of whom had practical clinical, managerial and IM&T experience.

Mr Granger spoke to E-Health Insider after the news was announced and an interview with him will be posted on this site shortly.