Major IT supplier pays out to NHS over misleading reports

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Emis Group says it has reached a settlement with NHS Digital over contract breaches
Company misreported performance of software used by six in 10 UK GPs
Settlement amount not disclosed but likely in the ”upper single digits of millions of pounds”

England’s biggest supplier of GP IT has reached a multimillion pound settlement after the company admitted to providing misleading information about the quality of its service.

In a market announcement on Friday, Emis Group confirmed a settlement had been reached with NHS Digital over “service level reporting issues”.

The company did not disclose the size of the settlement but said it was within the £11.2m set aside for this purpose. The company has previously estimated penalties associated with misreporting would be “in the order of upper single digits of millions of pounds”.

Emis provides the clinical software used by about six out of 10 GPs in the UK through a national contract managed by NHS Digital.

In January, the company told the market it had “identified that there has been a failure to meet certain service levels and reporting obligations with NHS Digital, relating to the group’s Emis Web product for GPs in England”.

Under the national contract, suppliers are contractually required to file monthly reports with NHS Digital on the quality of its service, focusing on incident resolution, service desk performance and system availability.

Emis Group said it had not met the required “service levels” in three areas of its contract, “including lower priority system issues and reporting”.

The news comes after the company announced a major upgrade of its clinical software last month, with plans to move tens of millions of NHS patient records onto Amazon Web Services.

It also follows news that another IT supplier, Accenture, which holds a national contract with NHS Digital, will likely face large penalties for a wide-scale outage of the NHSmail service last Saturday.