Scots fire gun on megadeal in bid to ditch mainframes

Decade-long deal could be worth £32m

The Scottish NHS is hunting for IT suppliers to help it ditch its 25-year-old mainframe tech in favour of a new software and services solution.

The Mainframe Solutions Transformation Programme will be worth between £8m and £32m over a 10-year period, National Services Scotland (NSS) – an NHS body – said in a tender document published over the weekend.

The deal will be split into two lots. The first, Community Health Index, will be worth between £5m and £20m and will help the Scottish NHS index and search patients through an electronic database.

"Lot 1 of this procurement is to replace NHS Scotland's CHI (Community Health Index) System with a modern Enterprise Master Patient Index (eMPI) Solution and optional record-locator service using recognised international healthcare standards," the tender said. "The solution includes application software, hardware, communications, services, hosting and support."

The second lot, Scottish Child Public Health and Wellbeing System, will be worth between £3m and £12m and will provide the Scottish NHS with a new system to help organise immunisation across the country.

This section of the tender will replace a number of existing immunisation programmes with a "modern solution using recognised international healthcare standards," the tender said.

"The solution includes application software, hardware, communications, services, hosting and support. The solution will support the improvement of health and wellbeing for Scotland's population by using call and recall for national programmes and interventions."

In the tender, the Scottish NHS said the new technology will replace mainframes, some of which have been in use for a quarter of a century.

"[We] intend to procure on behalf of NHS Scotland software and/or service solutions designed to modernise the legacy mainframe applications which support a number of key systems used within NHS Scotland and which may extend for use in the wider public sector," it said in the document.

"The current set of mainframe software solutions have served NHS Scotland exceptionally well over the past 25-plus years in some cases, but are now expensive to maintain and are not effective in supporting a modern service that is dependent on fast electronic communications and 'paper-lite' ways of working."