Granger awards Southern LSP contract

The national programme for NHS IT has placed its final local service provider contract, awarding the Southern cluster to Fuijitsu.

The 10-year,£896m deal will see Fuijitsu work with clinical systems provider IDX.

The contract marked the start of a busy week for NHS IT director general Richard Granger, who was also able to unveil an 'enterprisewide agreement' with software company Oracle on Monday, giving the NHS access to its databases and other products.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, however, Mr Granger was due to attend difficult meetings with GP systems supplier EMIS and Accenture, which holds two of the five LSP contracts. EMIS has announced that it has 'decided not to take part as a subcontractor to the chosen LSPs'.

This could cause a major headache for Mr Granger, since EMIS has a large chunk of the GP market, and he does not want to be seen riding roughshod over GP preferences. However it is also a high-risk strategy for the company, since it will miss the billions of pounds being spent by the national programme.

But Mr Granger received good news in another potentially difficult area - picture archiving and communications systems. The national programme wanted four suppliers to deliver PACs through LSPs, and had been looking for a good deal on pricing.

This week, Mr Granger told HSJ:

'We are starting to see... movement in the same direction as we have seen in EPR systems, in terms of the pricing of intellectual property' - meaning that firms are starting to cut deals to secure the work.