BT is playing a prominent role within the National Programme. It is delivering new IT systems across the capital in its capacity as the London local service provider and has rolled out N3, the broadband network that underpins the project.
BT is also building and managing the national transactional database and messaging service for the programme, known as the Spine. This enables a range of services such as Choose and Book, the Electronic Prescriptions Service and GP to GP transfer of records. It is also core to the introduction of the NHS Care Records Service, an electronic patient record for 50 million patients in England.
The London contract is worth £996 million over ten years and was awarded to BT in December 2003.
The Spine contract is worth £620 million over ten years and was awarded in December 2003.
BT won the N3 contract in February 2004. It is a seven year contract worth £530 million.
Picture Archiving and Communications Service (PACS) was added in 2004, worth £172 million.
N3
BT has built and is managing N3 – the state of the art, secure broadband national network for the NHS - connecting every NHS organisation across England and over a million NHS employees.
BT completed the network two months early in January 2007. Today it is one of Europe’s largest Virtual Private Networks with more than 30,000 connections throughout England and Scotland.
The N3 network has recently been voice enabled, allowing trusts to converge their voice and data over a single network – reducing the cost of internal phone calls and calls to mobiles.
BT continues to work in partnership with the NHS to help them exploit their investment in N3 by developing innovative, new services to meet their future needs. This year, BT will upgrade the N3 broadband network with a new broadband service that will bring higher bandwidth and an even more cost effective service to the NHS.
London
In London, significant progress has been made by BT. Every day more than 71,000 healthcare professionals in London are using the systems BT has installed. New systems and services have been put into 63 out of 74 of London’s trusts, across all care settings; Picture Archiving and Communications Systems, which enable images such as x-rays and scans to be stored electronically and viewed on screens, are now in use in every acute trust in London, every day; and new specialist health IT systems are working in more than 60% of community and mental health trusts.
The Spine
In a significant step, the first set of patient Summary Care Records have been created on the Spine. These records contain potentially life-saving information such as current medications, allergies and previous bad reactions to medicines.
BT has a solid track record of delivery success on the Spine and has reliably delivered the last 22 out of 22 releases – an outstanding achievement for a programme of this size and complexity. The services it provides are being used more every day, and the Spine is now handling more than two million transactions a day. More than half a million Smartcards have been issued to NHS staff, meaning they have been registered and approved to access the Spine. They will now be able to view – subject to appropriate and strictly enforced controls – a patient’s clinical and demographic information electronically.
About 2,000 people work across the three contracts. This includes both full time employees and contractors.
BT has a very good track record of delivering large-scale programmes. It has been working with Revenue and Customs for more than 30 years and developed one of the most advanced import/export processing systems in the world, called Chief. This handles more than 26 million import/export declarations a year and is an integral part of collecting £25 billion in customs duty.
BT also has contracts with the Department of Work and Pensions, Reuters, Unilever, In Bev, the City of Edinburgh Council, Registers of Scotland, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive to mention but a few. Indeed, even before the National Programme, we were the largest supplier of information and communications services to the NHS.
We do not comment on the financial situation of specific contracts. We understand the nature of large-scale IT contracts and we expect to make money over their total lifespan.
Even before the National Programme, BT was the largest IT supplier to the NHS. This includes:
NHSnet, the network that has now been replaced by N3
NHS Numbers For Babies service which ensures that within minutes of a baby's birth midwives can obtain their all-important NHS number. This unique identifier forms the basis of a lifelong electronic care record, eliminates incomplete or muddled sets of information and helps ensure prompt and appropriate care for infants right from birth.
NHS Direct, the online and telephone helpline which has provided help and advice on health matters to more than five million citizens in England is underpinned by BT Technology.
NHS24, the confidential health advice and information service in Scotland is another example of a national programme delivered and managed by BT for the benefit of NHS people and patients.
In addition to this the company is behind BT Wireless hospital, a number of clinical applications built on top of a managed wireless LAN. This includes the BT Managed Vocera service which allows staff to contact each other instantly anywhere in a hospital over a voice-activated badge. Recent contract wins include the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust and Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust.
BT has also recently launched the 'Mobile Health Worker' solution, which gives community nurses and other health professionals access to critical patient information at the point of care, through mobile devices chosen to suit individual requirements.