£50m of tech fund rolled over

Around £50m of the ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards: Technology Fund’ will be rolled over into ‘tech fund 2’ because projects could not meet deliverability targets.

The initial £260m fund was approved by Treasury a week ago and trusts have since been informed if they were successful.

NHS England director of strategic systems and technology, Beverley Bryant told EHI that the entire £90m that must be spent before April next year has been allocated.

However, around £50m of the £170m that was earmarked for the next financial year has not been assigned because not enough projects passed the “deliverability test”.

This left-over money will be rolled into ‘tech fund 2’, which was announced by health secretary Jeremy Hunt in September and worth £250m.

Bryant said successful trusts in the first round were either told that they have got the funding, or that they have passed the deliverability test, but need to improve their ‘value for money’ case in order to be accepted by Treasury.

She said that a prospectus provided to trusts in September said projects would need to prove a VFM of 2.4. NHS England has since agreed with Treasury that e-prescribing projects can have a VFM of anything higher than 1 and digital records projects, more than 1.5.

She hoped that this had set a precedent for the VFM that will be required for projects in the second technology fund, but said the higher the VFM a trust can demonstrate, the stronger the overall case for investment.

Trusts that have resubmitted their VFM cases are hoping to hear back before Christmas, but may not know until January. For some that may be too late to spend the money by April, in which case it will be returned to Treasury.

Bryant also revealed to EHI that about £20m of the first fund remains earmarked for open source projects, but said these are still going through evaluation.

She said all trusts that were not successful in their applications to the first technology fund will get feedback on why and NHS England will work with them to attract funding from the second fund, which is now worth £300m.

Bryant said she hoped to be able to announce the criteria for ‘tech fund 2’ before Christmas, but acknowledged this is a “hard ask” for her team and so it may be released in 2014.

However, she confirmed that trusts will have three months to apply for the second round of funding, as a number had complained that the one month they were given to apply for the first round of funding was not enough.