McKesson wins extension to NWCS contract

Connecting for Health has awarded a nine-month extension to the contract of healthcare IT supplier, McKesson, to provide its NHS-wide Clearing Service (NWCS) ClearNET, until 31 December 2006.

The value of the contract has not been disclosed but the heading on the company’s announcement described it as “multi-million pound”.

Commenting on the extension of the ClearNET service, Simon Manley, sales director and vice-president of McKesson UK, said, “McKesson has successfully managed the NHS-wide Clearing Service for over ten years now, and we are delighted to be able to extend our ClearNET solution in the medium term to provide for the new data services required.

He added: “Although the service has gained repeated plaudits for the level of service provided, the contract has come to its endpoint. We will not be switching off any system but decommissioning the service at the expiry of this most recent contract extension – the end of December 2006. At that point the replacement NPfIT service, Secondary Uses Service, will take over.”

McKesson say ClearNET is the NHS’s largest database of patient data containing over 223 million records. It provides a means of exchanging and processing high volumes of data between NHS organisations, data which is used as the basis for a number of analysis services including operating as the principal data feed to the Department of Health’s HES (Hospital Episode Statistics) data warehouse.

The new NPfIT replacement service, the Secondary Uses Service (SUS), has been upgraded to support the implementation of Payment by Results for the 2006/07 financial year. The extension to the ClearNET service will enable both ClearNET and SUS to run in parallel for the remainder of the year. McKesson have also been asked to provide a new service within ClearNET to process new XML data that trusts could start sending in October 2006.

Once the transition in early 2007 is complete, the intention is that SUS will provide timely, pseudonymised patient-based data and information for a variety of purposes relating to both direct clinical care, and additional areas including planning; commissioning; public health; clinical audit; benchmarking; performance improvement; research; and clinical governance.

Over time, SUS will also include data from non-patient based sources such as workforce data, and collect data from the NHS Care Records Service patient records right across the care pathway.