BT is playing a prominent role within the National Programme for IT. We rolled out and manage N3 – the secure national broadband network that connects all NHS locations and more than a million NHS staff.
We also built and operate the Spine - a highly secure database of patient information and a powerful messaging system. The Spine underpins many of the national services that the NHS relies on, such as the Electronic Prescription Service and the online hospital booking system Choose and Book.
And in London and the South of England, we’re the local service provider (LSP) working with community, acute and mental healthcare trusts to transform the way that patient care is delivered.
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 50,000 connections throughout England and Scotland.
The N3 network has 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. There are now over 100 NHS sites and rising using N3 voice services and more than six million phone calls have been made over N3. N3 also supports a national videoconferencing service managed by BT Conferencing.
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.
LSP
In London and the south of England, we’re working with acute, community and mental health trusts to modernise their IT systems and services to help improve the delivery of healthcare. Significant progress has been made and today there are over 190,000 healthcare professionals registered to use IT systems and services managed by BT.
We have now completed the roll-out of an electronic patient record system designed specifically to meet the needs of community and mental health trusts to 37 trusts in London and 25 trusts in the South of England.
So far, 15 Acute Trusts across London and the south of England now use Cerner Millennium systems to store, access and share the detailed medical records of patients.
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.
The Spine
We have built and manage the Spine - the secure database that stores essential patient information such as demographic and clinical information. But it’s much more than this.
It is also a messaging system that supports the delivery of other transformational services which underpin the modern NHS, including the electronic transfer of prescriptions and the electronic booking service Choose and Book.
The Spine gives nearly 900,000 healthcare professionals secure access to a patient’s clinical and demographic information. Each person issued with a smartcard is registered and approved to access the Spine. The highest levels of security are used on the Spine to ensure patients’ records are kept safe and confidential.
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 are one of the largest suppliers of IT and communications services to the NHS in the UK. We’re committed to helping healthcare commissioners and providers get the best out of information and technology systems and services – now and in the future.
Where we’ve deployed conferencing services, mobile working, telehealth applications and other innovations, we’ve shown we can save the NHS money while improving patient care.
Innovation is helping NHS Kirklees Community Healthcare Services provide higher quality patient care and save up to £10 million a year thanks to the roll-out of mobility solutions for their frontline community staff.
Innovation is helping the NHS save on travel costs with N3 videoconferencing – up to £160 million a year when fully adopted.
Innovation is helping Worcestershire Health Community use unified communications to deliver more efficient and effective healthcare while saving around £400,000 a year.
Innovation is helping to support how money flows through the NHS by using the NHS Spine service, which has already processed more than £100 billion via Payment by Results.
Innovation is helping St. Antonius Hospital Group in the Netherlands deal with the rapidly growing amounts of confidential patient data thanks to a new, secure, cost-efficient BT data centre.
Innovation is helping the NHS reduce carbon emissions through the use of their N3 broadband network, which could save around 250,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.