Tech fund money released this week

The first release of money from the £260m ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards: Technology Fund’ is expected this week.

NHS England’s head of technology strategy Paul Rice told EHI that the first trusts are a “whisper away” from getting their money and urged the rest to get their memorandum of understanding signed and returned.

“The first trusts should be getting the resources within the next week and everybody else who has been approved should be getting their MoUs signed and in train to release the resource,” he said.

Projects worth around £210m have been approved by NHS England in the first round of funding and £90m of this money must be spent in this financial year. However, trusts and suppliers have expressed concern about the tight timescales involved in getting £90m spent by April.

Rice confirmed that a significant number of projects are still awaiting final sign-off from Treasury as they had to re-submit their ‘value for money’ cases before Christmas.

To be approved, trusts need to show a VFM of more than 1 for e-prescribing projects, higher than 1.5 for digital records projects and at least 2.4 for the rest.

Rice said these trusts have draft MoUs so they can move forward quickly as soon as they get the nod from Treasury.

However, he said that trusts that have received approval for projects will not simply lose out if they cannot spend their assigned funding by April. The vast majority of successful projects are getting money in both this and the next financial years and cannot simply be abandoned.

“We need to agree implications of what happens to organisations that haven’t spent the money,” he said.

“But in principle, the fact that an organisation cannot spend all the money in this financial year doesn’t mean the project somehow is set to nought. These are still projects in which we have the highest confidence and are willing to support.”

Around £50m of the original fund has not been assigned and will be rolled over into a second technology fund, worth £250m, announced by health secretary Jeremy Hunt last September.

Rice revealed that the full prospectus for tech fund2 will not be released until after NHS England’s next project board meeting at the end of the month.

He said the information provided will be much more detailed than what accompanied the first round of funding and confirmed that trusts will have three months to apply.

“We intend to send out a comprehensive pack with all the materials in advance, including MoU documentation and samples of what good looked like the first time around,” Rice said.

The interview process will be retained as a key element of determining whether trusts have a “compelling and deliverable proposition”. The scope of the fund has also been expanded to focus more on Integrated Digital Care Records.

“Projects built around integration will be in line with the broader agenda of the fund, but this will not be at the expense of those bidding for support for the next logical step in their own roadmap,” he said.

Rice added that the process of feeding back to trusts that were not successful in the first round of funding is ongoing.