Central London NHS £21.4m IT deal up for grabs

Tenderers sought for five-year healthcare transformation project

IT providers are called to apply for a £21.4m tender for a five-year NHS London project involving telehealth services and mobility.

The project concerns managing an IT transformation at the Central London Community Healthcare (CLCH) NHS Trust, part of a wider tender for corporate support services.

Ian Millar, director of finance and corporate resources at CLCH NHS Trust, said the aim is to use technology to both cut its costs and improve its competitiveness and responsiveness.

"Some traditional ways of delivering care have now become outdated and inefficient," Millar said.

This degraded treatment and care and also wasted resources. The new transformation programme would aim to maintain quality at the lowest possible cost, he added.

CLCH NHS Trust employs about 3,000 healthcare professionals to serve the central West London boroughs of Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster as well as outer North London borough Barnet.

The tender, scheduled for completion next April, represents a streamlining, simplification and automation of internal processes as well as a move away from the "small-scale" outsourcing used by the Trust previously.

The Trust is seeking software development, user application support and development, business systems training, application and data processing services.