West Herts looks to boost infrastructure

West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust has gone out to tender for an infrastructure services contract worth 30m-£50m.

The tender, published in the Official Journal of the European Union, says the trust is looking for a supplier to move forward the trust’s digital hospital plans.

The five year contract, with an option to extend for a further two years, includes service management, information management, infrastructure and transition and implementation services.

“The trust may wish to extend, during the term of the contract, the ICT infrastructures services to cover potential clinical or information systems, business applications, integration and portals and digital service user engagement, such as telehealth,” says the tender document.

The contract, which will support the work of nearly 4,000 staff, also covers all connective networks, software and hardware, videoconferencing, fixed and mobile telephony, printing services, and application hosting.

The tender says the trust hopes to award a contract by November this year. “The bidder will be aware of the continuing changes that are occurring both in technology, and within the NHS at large,” it adds.

“The bidder must be able to flex its service arrangements to take into account these changes in technology and organisational structure that will inevitably occur during the five-year life of the contract.”

Last year, the trust approved an ambitious IT strategy, which will see it invest more than £67m in IM&T over the next few years.

The strategy focuses on the trust’s ‘Digital Hospital Environment’, which will “exploit new technology to support agile working, eliminate paper, enable service transformation, reduce administrative overheads and improve patient experience.”

The trust plans to implement an electronic patient record system in the 2015-16 financial year.