A £150 million contract has been awarded to six suppliers following Commercial Procurement Service’s launch of a new framework agreement, designed to allow NHS trusts to procure legacy information and management solutions.
Answer Digital, BridgeHead Software Limited, E.Novation UK Ltd, Insight Direct (UK) Ltd, Nautilus Consulting Limited and SynApps Solutions Limited have joined the national framework, which will see NHS trusts supported to procure cloud-based or on-site archives capable of interfacing directly with their live electronic patient record systems.
The framework is designed to tackle challenges highlighted around migrating from one electronic patient to another, or from a patient administration system to an EPR, with accessing patient data “a slow process” when a separate log-in is required to access archived information on the previous system.
In addition, the notice adds, organisations are sometimes “required to maintain archive contracts for one or more legacy systems, which may be unsupported, in order to allow continued access to the archived patient data.”
Through the framework, the new interfacing archives will allow data to be extracted, analysed and migrated to an organisation’s new system, thus ensuring that the data remains usable in the new system. As such, it is hoped that clinicians will be better equipped to access archived clinical patient data “seamlessly” from within their live EPR.
The framework contract is set to run until April 2027.
