HBOC has won a £3.6m, seven-year contract to manage all IT at Chichester Priority Care Services trust. The deal makes Chichester the first community and mental health trust to outsource its entire IT operation.

Three of the trust's staff are transferring to HBOC, but will stay at Chichester to provide on-site support.

The trust runs 10 different clinical applications, including two patient administration systems. These, together with finance, payroll and personnel systems, will be replaced by new packages running on three Digital Equipment Alpha machines at HBOC's data centre in Romford.

HBOC claims that the move will solve all the trust's year 2000 problems because the company will install new, millennium-compliant software on all the trust's systems.

For patient administration it will use the Protechnic package, incorporating community and mental health functions. Payroll and personnel functions will be handled by Peterborough Software's Opendoor, and financial management by McKeown's Integra. The contract also includes a data warehouse and a network linking the trust's 300 staff across its 40 sites.

As part of the deal, the trust's staff will also be equipped with new desktop PCs, to be replaced every three years.

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