Cambridge University Hospitals tenders £140m IT contract

Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has invited bids for £140 million IT infrastructure service contract, just three years after signing a similar sized contract with Hewlett Packard.

In its tender notice, the trust said it was looking for bids to provide a full range of IT infrastructure services, including a data centre, desktop solutions, active directory, networks and electronic patient records hosting and support.

However, a trust spokesman said the trust was only “market testing” and Hewett Packard continue to fufull it contractual obligations under eHospital programme set-up in 2013.

“CUH [the trust] has exponentially increased the use of its electronic patient records and seen a growing demand in the size and types of commodity IT services needed… As such, we are market testing to ensure best value for public money to meet these needs.”

The new contract would run for ten years, with a break clause after seven years, with the contract being reassessed on a yearly basis thereafter.

The tender is broken into sections covering network and security service, worth £40 million, and another £100 million contract for broader IT infrastructure services.

In 2013, Hewett Packard signed-up to provide the IT infrastructure for the trust’s ambitious £200 million eHospital programme, which included deploying the Epic EPR in the UK for the first time.

However, the programme ran into some initial deployment issues when Epic went live in October 2014, as the trust also found itself under financial pressure. Monitor placed the trust into special measures in September 2015, citing the cost of the eHospital programme and unrealised benefits for patients as among the issues facing it.

The trust remains in special measures, although the reputation of the eHospital programme has improved, with Dr Bob Wachter citing the Epic deployment as a difficult but ultimately highly successful digital transformation project in his recent review of a digital NHS.

The fortunes of Keith McNeil, the trust’s former chief executive who resigned shortly before the trust was placed into special measures, have also risen. He was appointed the first NHS wide chief clinical information officer in July and now holds many national digital roles.

Digital Health Intelligence: holds information on the clinical systems installed at trusts across the UK and uses this to calculate a Clinical Digital Maturity Index score. Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has a score of 84 and is ranked 24 / 152 (subscription / log-in required).