Emis loses preferred vendor status in Wales following procurement review
- 30 January 2018
Emis has announced it has lost preferred vendor status for GP practices in Wales.
The clinical software systems provider said the decision had been made by NHS Wales following a “planned procurement review process” which took place in the first quarter of 2017.
It means 195 practices will now have to be transitioned to a new supplier through 2019/20.
A statement from Emis added: “EMIS will continue to generate revenues on a reducing basis until the transition process is complete.”
NHS Wales Informatics Service told Digital Health News in a statement that it uses a “rigorous procurement process to select new suppliers of goods and services” in a bid to encourage “free and open competition”.
The statement added: “It is the intention to award the contract for GP clinical systems and services to two suppliers – Vision Health Ltd and Microtest Ltd. Both suppliers demonstrated a strong commitment and ability to meet core clinical and technical requirements and the wider Primary Care agenda, as well as further integration with the NHS Wales’ digital services platform.
“A third tender, submitted by EMIS Health Ltd, did not meet a number of the necessary evaluation criteria relating to the financial, contractual and functional requirements.”
Emis hit the headlines this month when it notified investors that it expected to incur penalties “in the order of upper single digits of millions of pounds” after failing to meet unspecified contractual requirements in its GP Systems of Choice contract, which governs the supply of electronic patient record systems.
The provider failed to meet standards across three categories in its service-level agreement with NHS Digital regarding its Emis Web GP electronic patient record product.
The company did not specify the areas in which it fell short, or incurred the penalties, however a spokesperson said they related to lower-priority system issues and reporting.
10 Comments
Such major change should have involved the users to a far greater extent. The patients will suffer. Frying pan and fire come to mind. Having different systems in England and Wales seems crazy in this day and age. I do wonder about the costs of the change and whether there are likely to be anything like accurate estimates over the coming three years.
Of course, the patients will be the main people to suffer. It will be 3 years before all the patients records will have settled down on replacement systems. Patients want medical record integration between primary and acute settings. Also care staff in the community are being criticised for a lack of health and care joint-up working, delayed longer by this decision. Three more years of Wales having probably the most primitive healthcare IT support in Western Europe.
Having only two preffered vendors in Wales and Scotland makes this type of decision very disruptive for users who have fine tuned their systems to their practice processes. In my opinion the users should make the decisions to change not the centre. The centre should compare the systems and inform the users of the performance, developments and ratings of the systems to encourage change by the users to the better systems. The users know the real cost of changing systems in terms of retraining and disruption.
Chris Frith
Past EMISNUG Chairman
Considering the heat that EMIS Health has been getting on the Glassdoor review website from their own employees for some considerable time now none of this should come as a great surprise. Should be getting shot of the higher echelons of the development department.
I’m sure the root of half the problems is that the majority of people in leadership positions who know what they were doing, and held strategic relationships has been pushed out of the business. It’s a shambles, with a terrible atmosphere.
I guess you have seen the Glassdoor reviews of how terrible it all is at EMIS. This is just one example: https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Employee-Review-EMIS-Health-RVW15898687.htm
These reviews must be most useful to the board and management. Good to hear they read them. There are things detailed that can be easily changed if wished.
bw
Interesting, in that for most of England, Vision and Microtest have been replaced with both EMIS WEB and TPP, the latter of whom I understand did not even apply as part of the procurement! Is this a sign of things to come with GPSOC for England up for renewal in Dec? Who is going to bear the cost of all those system migrations?
I understand that Wales (and Scotland) require that the Clinical Supplier hosts their datacentre in the relevant country. TPP are unwilling to do this, hence they have not applied to be part of this procurement process.
Well, this has been a good month…
Comments are closed.