Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has agreed to pay some £600,000 in compensation to the NHS for the disruption caused by a massive failure at its data centre hosting NHS systems.
The company is leading NHS IT modernization in the North West and West Midlands region of England, running new software systems from a single data centre. Last July the computers in the secure data center failed, as did the automatic switch that was meant to happen to a backup centre.
As a result over 50 NHS organisations in the North West were left without access to their computer systems for two days or more, leaving health staff having to revert to pen and paper.
According to the Manchester Evening News the failure affected the care of about 2,000 patients in Greater Manchester because theatre management and appointment-booking systems couldn’t be accessed.
The paper today reports that CSC has now agreed to pay £600,000 towards extra administration costs after staff had to make provisional appointments using paper lists, then match them to computer records once the system was restored.
It is not clear whether the penalties will be paid to Connecting for Health, the agency responsible for NHS IT, or the hospitals and clinics that bore the brunt of the extra costs of disrupted patient care and having to use manual systems.
A spokesperson for CSC told EHI: "The reference to compensation and the figure you mention was allegedly within an NHS Board paper which the Manchester Evening News said they had seen a copy of.
"CSC cannot comment on anything contained within a Board paper that is not CSC’s and that we haven’t seen a copy of.
Despite last July’s computer failure CSC has since won huge additioanl IT contracts for two more regions of the NHS.
On Monday the agency responsible for NHS IT, Connecting for Health, confirmed that it had transferred contracts to CSC for the North East and Eastern regions of England – contracts that had originally been awarded to professional services firm Accenture.
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CSC failure leaves 80 trusts without IT systems