BT sealed two of its most important deals yesterday as it signed contracts with the National Health Service to design and run two patient record databases, worth £1.6bn over the next decade.
The company beat American IT group IBM to both contracts and is also involved in the consortium which clinched a third £1.1bn contract to produce a patient record database in the north-east of England.
"This is undoubtedly the biggest contract day we have ever had," said Andy Green, who heads the company's global services business which runs major contracts. "They suddenly catapult us into the world league."
The deals are the largest of their kind ever signed by a European health service and are expected to create jobs in the IT industry. BT's success has also raised hopes that the company will be able to challenge the dominance of rivals such as EDS and Accenture in the race for lucrative government IT projects. Similar databases are understood to be under consideration in Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa and New Zealand. The Welsh and Scottish authorities have also still to find partners to convert their patient records to digital form.
The contracts awarded yesterday are the first three of seven which the government hopes will revolutionise the way that English health professionals access information critical to making clinical decisions.
Under the first £620m contract, BT in partnership with LogicaCMG, Sun and Oracle will create a national patient record database and messaging service. Tim Smart, chief executive of BT's IT consulting arm Syntegra, explained that the database will provide basic information for 50m English patients. "Should you be a resident of Brighton and are on holiday in Scarborough and taken ill there, local doctors can access basic medical information such as blood type and any major conditions that you have," he said.
BT also won a £1bn deal to design and maintain a more complex patients' record system for London. The company is also a sub-contractor for Accenture which yesterday clinched the third NHS contract, worth £1.1bn, to create a patient record database for the north east of England. BT will get about £150m to £200m from that deal over ten years.
The contracts will increase BT's revenues by £50m in the current year and £150m in the year to end March 2005. The company's share price, however, was stagnant yesterday as analysts continued to fret about the prospects for growth in BT's core UK residential phone market.
While BT's global services business, formerly Ignite, is securing new contracts, its retail division has not seen a major uplift in revenues despite a number of new initiatives.
