South West Yorkshire gets IT partner

South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has awarded a £9m contract to Phoenix for provision of IT services.

The five year partnership contract means Phoenix, a managed IT services company, will develop and enhance IT services at the trust.

The trust provides mental health, learning disability and community services, and it hopes Phoenix will help improve support to service users and access to self-managed care, as well as supporting care closer to home.

Adrienne Pickering, South West Yorkshire’s deputy director of IT said this is a significant milestone for the trust.

“We put people who use our services at the centre of all we do and modernising services and offering the best technological solutions to underpin good care is fundamental to this,” she said.

Pickering added that the partnership will “provide opportunities to collaborate to enhance the experience of service users and to provide staff with equipment and technical support to work in the most efficient, effective and agile way.”

The trust uses TPP’s SystmOne as its electronic patient record system  and also have patients using telehealth devices as part of the Yorkshire and the Humber Telehealth Hub, which was set up in 2011 as a partnership between Airedale NHS Foundation Trust, the University of Hull and South West Yorkshire.

The trust hopes Phoenix will support and enable staff to use technology to best support patients.

The provision of IT services will include desktop services, LAN network management, data centre services and data storage, among other things, according to the contract award notice placed in the Official Journal of the European Union.

 Chief executive of Phoenix said the contract win is a “perfect example of our collaborative approach to working with the NHS and the wider public sector.”