After weeks of speculation, Accenture, one of four prime contractors for the £6bn National Programme for NHS IT (NPfIT), has walked away from its £2bn contracts for two of the scheme’s five regions.
The next few months – until the handover to CSC is completed in January – will be vital in ensuring that the programme is not allowed to be derailed.
The official line is that CSC, already responsible for NPfIT’s North West and West Midlands area, will apply its formula to get the lagging ex-Accenture regions back on track.
Though Accenture managed 827 deployments in its regions, they were almost exclusively smaller-scale GP and community care systems. CSC has done well delivering the large, complex patient administration systems (Pas) at the core of the programme, and, so the theory goes, can now do the same in the East and North East.
The main differentiator between the Accenture and CSC approaches was in their work with iSoft, the second-tier Pas provider that the two prime contractors shared. For the handover strategy to work, much will hinge on iSoft.
Since NPfIT’s first delays, NHS IT director general Richard Granger has emphasised the immaturity of the healthcare software market.
If the programme was buying accounting software it would have a range of options with well-resourced and experienced implementation and support teams, he says. But the programme is breaking new ground, and the systems contracted are still in development.
To some extent, NPfIT cannot win. NHS IT directors are baffled that Granger bought software that is still being built. But, equally, long-term government programmes are often criticised for being obsolete by the time they deliver.
Regardless of rights and wrongs, the relationship between the prime contracto r and the software supplier is of unusual importance. And where CSC took the iSoft situation in hand, Accenture walked away from it.
But even for CSC it is not all roses. Because development of iSoft’s next-generation software is slow, the systems it is installing now will have to be upgraded, and such a strategy will cause more upset along the way.
What happens next will depend on CSC’s continuing work with iSoft; how the latter’s financial issues play out; and the implications of Granger’s decision to create a catalogue of suppliers offering additional capacity.
Accenture’s departure has, so far, been managed as well as can be expected. But it is not over yet.
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