BT may win new Cerner ‘greenfield’ deal

BT could be on the verge of being awarded a lucrative deal to install Cerner Millennium at three new hospital trusts in the south of England.

E-Health Insider understands a new deal is currently with Treasury pending approval, and the completion of the local service provider contract resets.

Earlier this month, BT completed migration of the seven live Cerner trusts installed by Fujitsu into the BT data centre. This will enable BT to standardise the version of Millennium used by NHS trusts in London and the South.

If completed, the new greenfield deals would see BT, the local service provider for London and parts of the South, implement Cerner at three ‘greenfield’ sites: North Bristol, Oxford Radcliffe, and Royal Bath. The three trusts would commit matching local funding to the national NPfIT funding.

EHI has been told the trusts have had to complete a business case approval process, and the overall price had to meet DH and Treasury approval.

Skeleton Cerner teams are said to be on site already at the three trusts, ready to ramp up projects through April and into early May, assuming the new LSP deals are signed. The target date for implementation is said to be end of 2010.

Provision for four ‘greenfield’ implementations was included in the £546m deal awarded to BT in April 2009. This was also to support eight existing sites – later reduced to seven – and to put in 25 instances of RiO.

The other candidates for the fourth Cerner spot were Basingstoke and Yeovil. Basingstoke is said to have had a Cerner team on site for a six week study, but then decided against.

EHI understands that the new ‘greenfield’ deal is likely to be announced as part of a revised contract for London and the South. A new deal is likely to see BT required to deliver new systems to a smaller number of hospital trusts.

BT currently has recently been rebuilding some momentum in the hospital sector. The LSP has just announced a go-live at St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust, and at the end of 2009 it completed a go-live at Kingston Hospital. This took the number of London Cerner sites to eight, with a further seven in the South.

Cerner meanwhile is having a fair degree of success working directly with Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where over 30 wards are now live with e-prescribing. Implementation work is also at an advanced stage at Royal Berkshire NHS FoundationTrust and Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

Assuming the new deal is signed and delivery happens to schedule, there could be a total of 21 NHS hospital trusts running Millennium by the end of 2010.

It remains unclear, however, where further Cerner implementations in the capital will come from. St Mary’s, part of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, which had been due to be next after St George’s, is understood to have extended its contracts for existing patient administration systems instead.