Nine companies in GP systems beauty parade

Nine companies including one newcomer to the market presented their GP IT systems to GP and primary care trust representatives as part of the GP Systems of Choice procurement process last week.

The beauty parade of GP IT suppliers, including the eight existing suppliers plus one company developing a new system, took place over two days at Connecting for Health’s headquarters in Leeds in front of a panel which included PCT IT leads, regional IT leads GPs and CfH personnel.

Dr Gillian Braunold, CfH’s joint GP clinical lead, said each supplier was given anonymised rankings by the panel following their interviews.

She added: “We invited GPs from all the system suppliers’ user groups including the user groups so that they could all get to see everything.”

One panel member who attended the meeting told EHI Primary Care that he believed the presentations may have changed the view of some PCT representatives who had previously been in favour a single system across their patch to the benefits of a mixed economy of systems.

“I think a few people changed from supporting a monopoly situation,” he added.

Areas suppliers were questioned on including their plans for hosting their different systems and what back-up arrangements they had in place should N3 fail.

The procurement process will now move on to negotiations about pricing between individual suppliers and CfH.

When the procurement was launched in the middle of February CfH estimate that it would take 90 days to complete and be finished by the end of May. It is unclear if this is still the timetable although Dr Braunold told EHI Primary Care that the procurement was working through the normal processes and that an arrangement was in place to cover the missing months from April 1 until the framework agreements are in place.

Treasury approval for the full business case for GPSoC is still awaited.