Reports have claimed that BT is still up to 12 months behind on the largest of its three deals on the Connecting for Health program, which brought analyst criticism and caused investors to push its stock price down.
However, speaking to Computer Business Review, a BT spokesperson claimed that the reports were reheated news, that the company had never publicly spoken about the length of delays on the contract and that it did not anticipate incurring fines on any of its NHS contracts.
While the spokesperson would not comment on the length of delays on its contract to overhaul the IT of the NHS’ London cluster, he claimed that BT was on schedule on the broadband and database contracts it was working on.
The NHS’ Connecting for Health program is one of the most expensive and ambitious public sector projects in the world. It involves a total overhaul of its IT and the introduction of an electronic patients records system to enable doctors and hospital clinicians to access patient information from anywhere in the country.
Richard Granger, director general of NHS IT, split the project into five different regions, and gave two contracts to Accenture, and one each to BT Group, CSC, and Fujitsu, with BT also overseeing the creation of a nationwide database, and a national broadband network.
Earlier in the year Accenture admitted that its contracts with the NHS would make a loss of between $110m and $150m this year, and that losses will continue in 2006.
In June, Fujitsu kicked subcontractor IDX Systems off its contract for the South of England due to delays with its clinical records software, Carecast, though it is still a major partner on the London cluster project that BT is running.
Earlier this month General Electric Corp’s health care division announced the acquisition of IDX for $1.2bn. The BT spokesperson claimed that IDX’s removal from the Fujitsu contract had enabled it to bring a sharper focus to its work for BT and did not anticipate distraction problems regarding IDX’ change in ownership.
