Connecting for Health fails to lead on Contact
NHS Connecting for Health continues to run its own local version of Microsoft Exchange rather than migrating to NHS Contact, the web-based e-mail service it procured for the health service at a total cost of up to £90m. At Healthcare Computing 2006 last month CfH chief executive Richard Granger castigated NHS trusts for not fully […]
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Mixed results as Contact splutters into life
E-Health Insider has had a bumper response from NHS staff sharing their experiences of the first week of Contact, the new NHS email system, following last week’s news on the problems some readers have experienced. A major frustration appears to be the difficulty or inability to configure Contact to operate within Microsoft Outlook – a serious problem […]
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New NHS email system switched on
The new NHS email system, Contact, has belatedly gone live after the abortive launch two weeks ago – but early indications from some E-Health Insider readers suggest that some significant teething problems remain with the new Cable & Wireless provided ‘Contact’ system. One NHS IT manager wrote to E-Health Insider this week providing his anonymous […]
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Contact lost as NHS e-mail relaunch misfires
Contact, the new NHS e-mail service supplied by Cable and Wireless, is down for maintenance after problems at its launch on Friday, which some reports say left staff without access to their mailboxes. The Contact service has been temporarily replaced with the previous NHSmail system, as supplied by EDS. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, the servers […]
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EDS given £9m compensation for NHSmail contract
EDS is to recieve £9m in compensation from the Department of Health for the cancellation of its 10-year contract to supply NHSmail, originally awarded in September 2002. The news comes a month after Cable & Wireless was awarded a nine-year replacement contract worth £29.3m for supplying NHSmail’s existing 65,000 users with email and related services, rising […]
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C&W win NHS email and directory contract
Cable & Wireless is the new contractor appointed to manage central e-mail and directory services for the NHS, the Department of Health (DH) announced today. A spokesman for the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) confirmed that the nine year contract was worth £29.3m with the current user base which stood at 65,000 (25,000 active users) last […]
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NPfIT re-tenders for NHSmail contract
The National Programme for IT has placed an advert in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) seeking a service provider for an email and directory service for the NHS. The advert makes clear that the existing NHSmail service is to be withdrawn. The issuing of the advert follows the decision by NPfIT last […]
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National programme says NHSmail was ‘unacceptable’
The National Programme for IT has said that the decision to terminate the £90 million contract with EDS for a national NHS email and directory service, just 18 months after it was signed, was taken because EDS was failing to deliver and take-up of the service too low. With the future of the NHSmail service […]
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Granger terminates EDS’s NHSmail contract
The National Programme for IT has terminated the £90 million NHSmail contract with Electronic Data Systems to provide email and directory services to one million NHS staff. Richard Granger, director-general of NHS IT, last week pulled the plug on the 10-year EDS contract for the NHSmail web-based email service. A national programme spokesperson confirmed to […]
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NHSmail, a doctor’s tale
Hospital doctor, Andrew Harrison, who was a computer programmer before switching to medicine, signed-up with NHSmail recently. Here’s his description of the “not entirely positive” experience. My existing email service is about to be discontinued, so it is fortuitous that the first application delivered by the National Programme is an "email address for life" for […]
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