Website of the Department of Health

It is important to note that, while the National Programme uses national and regional contracts for the provision of much of the IM&T required by the NHS, this does not mean that individual NHS organisations will not need to develop business case skills. Individual NHS organisations will need to feed their own requirements into the procurement of the NHS Care Records Services (NCRS), for example (see below).

And they will need some form of audit trail if local monies are used to support the National Programme, eg to procure services such as PACS that are not covered by central funding.

For both these reasons, NHS organisations will still need the skills necessary to prepare their own business cases.

The National Programme originally had four main strands, two of which have now been merged:

NHS Care Record Systems (NCRS): This strand of the National Programme covers the provision of Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems covering such clinical applications as: integrated master patient index, departmental systems, electronic clinical ordering, results reporting, prescribing and multi-professional care pathways. The Department signed a national contract with British Telecom in December 2003 for the provision of the national "spine" for NCRS. It also signed contracts with five "Local Service Providers" (LSPs) in December 2003 and January 2004 for the rollout of the full NCRS functionality. Each LSP contract covers a cluster of Strategic Health Authorities.

The clusters, with their respective Local Service Providers*, are as follows:

*[Note: Each Local Service Provider is effectively a grouping of firms- this table identifies the lead firm in each consortium].

Please see the separate sections of this website giving advice on the preparation of   supplementary business cases for the NHS Care Records Service and on the application on  optimism bias in IM&T cases generally

Electronic Transmission of Prescriptions: To suit the patient's convenience and also to minimise fraud. This would provide electronic links between GP surgeries, high street pharmacies and the Prescriptions Pricing Authority. This has now been merged with the NHS Care Records Service (see above).

Electronic Bookings: The Government attaches great importance to the introduction of the electronic booking of appointments to suit the patient's convenience and to minimise the number of patients who do not attend. The Department signed a contract with SchlumbergerSema in October 2003 for the provision of electronic booking systems.

New National Network (N3) Project: This is the infrastructure element of the National Programme. It will procure an infrastructure to replace the existing NHSNet with better coverage of NHS organisations and GP surgeries and a much-improved quality of service. The Department signed a contract with British Telecom in February 2004 for the provision of this service. The aim is to "migrate" the whole of the NHS to the new system over the next 2-3 years.

All IM&T investment undertaken by NHS organisations must be in accordance with the aims of  the National Programme. The Programme is run at national level by NHS Connecting for Health,  an agency of the Department of Health. Detailed updates on the progress of the Programme  are issued at intervals by NHS Connecting for Health and can be found on their website

That said, investment by NHS organisations, whether or not under the National Programme, will necessitate local business cases, and the guidance documents provided below are therefore as relevant as ever.