After weeks of frenzied speculation, much of it by E-Health Insider readers in our E-Health Forums, conjecture on contract award day – ‘C-day’ – now appears over. Monday, 8 December now looks certain to be ‘C-day’, the date on which the first major contract awards by the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) will be officially announced by the Department of Health immediately after announcements have been made to the Stock Exchange. An official spokesperson for the NPfIT declined to confirm or deny whether announcements would be made on Monday, and simply stated “It will be shortly…” Sources strongly indicate, however, that the Department of Health now looks certain to announce the award of three key contracts on Monday. The three contracts will be: The National Application Service Provider (NASP) contract to provide the ‘Data Spine’; the Local Service Provider (LSP) contract for London; and the LSP contract for the North East, Yorkshire and Humberside. If announced on Monday, the awards will come less than twelve months after the first advert was placed in the Official Journal of the European Commission (OJEC) in January 2003. The first NPfIT contract, for e-booking, was awarded on 9 October to Schlumberger-Sema. The initial e-booking contract was worth £64.5m, far smaller than the NASP and two LSP contracts. Today (5 December) the speculation in EHI’s E-Health Forum’s, Latest…, discussion topic, rapidly hardened on Monday as the announcement date. The date was subsequently verbally confirmed to EHI by multiple reliable sources closely involved in the procurement process. Accenture Alliance have been widely tipped to win the North East LSP contract, but the two horse race between BT and IBM to win the separate NASP and London LSP contracts remains anyone’s guess.
