CSC today confirmed they would compete to take over from Accenture, should the company withdraw from its contracts to the North-east and Eastern cluster of the National Programme for IT.
Speaking at a conference in New York, CSC’s chief financial officer, Mike Keane, said: “If the cluster becomes vacant, that would be potential business. We have a very comfortable relationship with the NHS and we believe that this would be business we would like to compete for.”
CSC was awarded the LSP contract, worth £973 million for the North-west and West Midlands region of the NHS in England in December 2003. CSC has implemented iSoft software at approximately 12 acute trusts and 50 community and mental health trusts.
Keane said: “We have been performing well. We are all dependent on sub-contractors in terms of software providing. iSoft is our vendor, and we are helping them to develop the next-generation product on time.”
CSC’s CFO added that he believed his company had mitigated the risk from iSoft by agreeing a deal with the company to help speed up the development of the software. CSC takes charge of seven ‘out of cluster’ trusts.
“We are going to overlay some of the discipline. We are in a system development and we will overlay the system at iSoft to help them meet that milestone.
“We have the ability to step in and put our people into the process, to take over the project if this milestone does not look like it will be reached.”
Accenture’s 10 year LSP contracts are worth £934m for the East and £1.1bn for the North-east regions of the NHS in England. The company is in talks with Connecting for Health over its commitment to the programme.