Big UK health deals awarded

By ADAM GIFFORD

Britain's National Health Service says Fujitsu is the preferred systems integrator for the southern region component of its £5 billion ($13.5 billion) overhaul of health IT systems, known as the national spine project.

Fujitsu's southern England contract is worth £896 million over 10 years.

The decision means the local service providers for all five health regions are now known, and all have relationships with listed Auckland dental practice management software company Software of Excellence International.

Chief executive Paul Weatherly said although Software of Excellence was not part of the formal consortium, it had been talking to Fujitsu and there was no other dental software provider in sight.

The challenge now was to get individual hospitals and large dental practices to commit to the software.

"The contracts make us the preferred solution.

"If you are a hospital or community practice buying a system, we will do a turnkey integration with, for example, iSoft and the spine, and that solution will be pre-bought by the NHS, so if you are a hospital you get that free.

"If you buy something else, you have to pay for it and for the integration," Weatherly said.

"Private dentists will still be able to buy any system they want, but they will need to upgrade over the next few years and they will need to integrate into the national data spine."

The NHS is trying to standardise systems and create an integrated health record held centrally and make it available to every health provider in Britain at the touch of a button.

"It's ambitious and there are a few people throwing mud at it but it is absolutely what is needed," said Weatherly.

Apart from private dental practices, the market consists of community dental schemes, which the NHS finances to target special population groups, dental hospitals, which are typically teaching hospitals with 50 to 200 chairs where patients are treated as part of teaching, and hospitals that run emergency dental services or some specialised services in conjunction with general medical services.

Because many dentists have pulled out of the NHS-funded system, the NHS has set up high-street dental access clinics.

Weatherly said it would be two or three years before the results would start showing up in Software of Excellence's results, because it did not charge for software until it was implemented.