NHS CEO challenged over North Bristol NHS' Cerner implementation

Sir David Nicholson, the CEO of the NHS in England and senior responsible officer for the National Programme for IT, has been asked to explain a £14m discrepancy between the implementation of two Patient Administration Systems in Bristol.

North Bristol NHS Trust is currently being implemented with Cerner Millennium by BT for a cost of £22m, a significantly higher figure than the £8.2m being paid by neighbouring organisation United Hospitals Bristol NHS for System C's Medway. 

Despite the £14m gap between the Cerner and Medway implementations in Bristol, the £22m bill at North Bristol is £6.3m less than average cost of BT implementing Cerner in the south of England, which stands at £28.3m.

The cost gap is being called into question by Richard Bacon MP, who in a letter last week to Nicholson asked, "As the Senior Responsible Owner for the National Programme, can you give your explicit undertaking that the North Bristol contract represents value for money for taxpayers?"

North Bristol is one of three Trusts cited by Bacon - along with Bath and Oxford Radcliffe - as having steep prices attached to their respective Cerner deployments. To make matters worse, Bacon also asked Nicholson for an explanation as to why the implementations at the three Trusts had slipped from planned end-of-July go live dates.

According to e-Health Insider, North Bristol is expected to now go live by the end of December 2011, Oxford Radcliffe has scheduled a mid-November launch, while Royal United Hospitals Bath no longer has a firm go-live date.