The managing director of Accenture’s health team has said that the pace of delivery in the North East and Eastern regions of the National Programme for IT is now set to step up a gear. Deployment of new systems and services to GPs, hospitals and mental health services by will have begun by Easter, he said.
Speaking to E-Health Insider, Ken Lacey, Accenture’s Global Managing Director for Health and Life Sciences, said that a wide range of deployment work will be underway by Easter. "In that timescale there will be a significant amount of deployment."
Accenture’s top man responsible for delivering the national programme contracts is a Texan who has lived in the UK for 20-odd years. He stressed that Accenture was delivering "a large complex programme" but said the pace of deployment is now set to increase. "We would have liked to deploy more than we have, but I think that is going to step up now."
Lacey pointed to the huge amount of work had been carried out since Accenture was awarded its LSP contracts in December 2003, including mobilising the complex teams needed to develop and deliver services. "We have put together teams to do all the design, build and testing work, together with getting the first release of the software ready to go."
And over the past few months this grand programme of mobilisation, development and testing has begun to translate into the delivery of new services, which are now providing benefits to clinicians and their patients.
"We have now got an SAP (Single Assessment Process) solution out in Newcastle with over 300 users, who have now been using it for three months," said Lacey, who indicated this SAP solution for older people will soon be rolled out more widely.
Accenture’s MD for Health also highlighted a new A&E solution that has been developed and is now being used in Nottingham, "with a lot of happy users". Further newly developed solutions would follow soon, said Lacey. "There will be further go lives soon."
Asked whether initial imminent deployments will first focus on providing Patient Administration System-style functionality as part of the initial release of the NHS Care Record Service, Lacey said: "It will include that type of functionality and it will also include new functionality in other areas, including GP practices and mental health."
Accenture’s LSP boss spoke to EHI in the week that Accenture announced it had signed sub-contractor deals with Cognos, EMC Documentum, First DataBank Europe and Informatica, taking the total of major sub-contractor deals it has signed to eight.
"These are all part of the technology we need to provide the core services set out in the OBS (Output Based Specification)," said Lacey. "As we responded to the OBS we specified what sub-contractors would do."
He confirmed that all the major sub-contractors were now in place for Accenture to deliver the core services set out the original OBS, but indicated that there may yet be further deals signed. "Potentially, and some of that is dependent on extra and additional services that we may be required to do."
The biggest and most high-profile of these additional services, which has moved centre stage since the original LSP contract awards, is the requirement to deliver Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS).
When preferred PACS suppliers were named by the DH back in May 2004, GE was said to have been awarded the ‘right’ to supply PACS to three regions including the North East and Eastern. Last August this position shifted with GE replaced by a "collaboration" between Agfa, BT and Accenture.
Asked whether the PACS deal had been signed yet for the North East and Eastern clusters, he replied: "No it has not. It’s in the works though and you should hear something about that this month."