The medical services contract could be extended by up to an additional five years, bringing the potential total value to up to GBP850m ($1.6bn), which would make it Atos’ largest contract to date. The win also comes hot on the heels of a $400m application management outsourcing deal with car manufacturer Renault announced last week.
The Paris, France-based company will continue to assess the functional capacity of people making health-related benefits in the UK. People claiming benefits on medical grounds are referred to Atos, which schedules and provides medical examinations, reviews the claims, and forwards its assessment to the DWP. About 950 Atos employees work on the contract, and the company has subcontracted about a third of the overall value of the deal to Nestor Healthcare Group, which will provide additional medical staff. Atos has a similar, smaller contract with the UK Department of Trade and Industry, where it assesses the medical claims made by injured coal miners.
Atos plans to further develop its systems for the DWP, with the longer-term aim of eliminating paper from the process. The price of the contract is based on anticipated volume and will be bound by service level agreements regarding turnaround time of applications, medical quality, and claimant and DWP employee satisfaction.
According to Simon Chipperfield, VP medical services at Atos, the company won the deal against bids from two other sets of bidders: Capita and Bupa; and Vertex, IBM, and BMI Health Services. The original deal SchlumbergerSema signed in 1998 was a five-year contract worth GBP305m ($588m) which was extended by two years in 2003. Chipperfield said Atos began competing for the new contract in September 2003, and submitted its final bid at the beginning of December 2004.
The DWP recently had its fingers burnt by an IT services contract with EDS, after a major systems failure in November 2004 caused huge embarrassment. EDS operates the DWP’s desktop support contract, and during a routine system upgrade, DWP employees were unable to log into the system, unable to access the benefits system, the internet and the intranet for several days. This meant staff had to perform duties such as sending messages by fax, and hand writing checks so people could receive their benefits. Consequently, it caused a backlog of unprocessed claims. Newspaper reports put the number of desktops affected at up to 80,000, which would rank it as one of the worst computer failures in UK government history.
