Tech fund second round announced

Trusts that applied for the Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards Technology Fund will be updated over coming days about moving on to the second round.

The £260m fund was announced by health secretary Jeremy Hunt in May and £90m needs to be spent before April next year.

It attracted around 760 applications totaling £650m from acute, mental health and community trusts.

Guidance released in June said a panel of advisors would work with trusts during August and September to review their applications and successful projects would be announced in October.

“We are writing out today and over the weekend to everyone who applied in the first phase,” Beverley Bryant, NHS England’s director of strategic systems and technology, told EHI.

“Everyone’s being informed about the results of the first stage and telling them what the second stage will be.”

Bryant confirmed that not all of the 760 applications would move on to the second stage, but said that did not mean that not all trusts would do so as many had made a number of applications.

NHS England’s focus is on getting the first applications that will receive the £90m in funding this financial year finalised.

The remaining £170m will be spent next year and all trusts must match any funding received.

Hunt this week announced another £240m for the Technology Fund and a time extension that will see the government and NHS organisations invest £1 billion in IT over the next three years.

Bryant said some of the new money will be used to “satisfy demand” from the first lot of applications.

“But we’re also keen to push on integration between health and social care and across health economies. We haven’t exactly decided how this will work yet.”

Guidance on the first round of the fund focused on four key areas: adoption of the NHS Number as the primary identifier; integrated digital care records including information sharing within and between organisations; e-prescribing; and advanced scheduling.

Bryant said the original £260m is a type of capital called PDC that is only available to trusts.

The second fund will have the same criteria to encourage intergration across health communities, but may be expanded to include other organisations.

This could involve community interest companies, clinical commissioning groups or academic health science networks that want to lead and administer funding on behalf of a whole health economy, being able to apply in a second round.

However, Bryant confirmed that the money will not be available to GPs as has been reported elsewhere.

The confusion arose because the Department of Health and NHS England press releases said the fund would help achieve the government’s aim for all patients to have access to their GP record online by 2015.