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Former health secretary and chair of health select committee says that better use of IT will help eliminate waste in the NHS, reports Gill Hitchcock When the Audit Commission published its review of England's NHS this summer and warned of growing financial pressures, trusts already knew that achieving savings equivalent to about 5% of their budgets each year until 2015 meant doing things differently and more efficiently. Stephen Dorrell, the chair of the health select committee and former health secretary, believes making better use of IT is key to eliminating inefficiencies in the NHS, but...

Software firm Alert will no longer deploy its electronic patient solution at CircleBath Hospital Circle Health and Alert have "mutually agreed to end their partnership", it has been revealed. The Portuguese software firm had a contract with private healthcare provider Circle Health to implement its clinical software at its CircleBath Hospital. The hospital runs a System C patient administration system, on which Alert electronic patient record was going to be implemented, according to E-health Insider. The plan was for Alert to convert its Portuguese software to a UK environment. A spokeswoman...

Outsourcer to use same IT systems as for English operation Northern Ireland's Department for Social Development has awarded Atos Origin a contract to provide support services for benefits processing. The deal will run for seven years with options to extend for a further three and is valued at £82.2m. It is essentially a business process outsourcing deal for the delivery of medical services and supporting administration, but will also involve the implementation of IT systems to support the operation. A spokeswoman for Atos Origin told GGC that the company will make use of the IT systems that...

Health service organisations are turning to each other to provide shared services Although cross-boundary NHS service provision was commonplace prior to the 1974 NHS reorganisation, such services declined afterwards. However, since the NHS Plan of 2000 – which created the current trust-centric structure for England – they have been returning, although some such operations date back to the early 1990s. The idea behind NHS shared services is that trusts and other health bodies in a given area can pool their resources and go for the clear economies of scale that larger public sector organisations...

Public mistrust of private companies providing healthcare puts social enterprises at a disadvantage For-profit companies have made it harder for social enterprises working in the NHS, according to a spokeswoman for the social enterprise sector. Allison Ogden-Newton, chief executive of Social Enterprise London , said that public mistrust of any non-state provider of healthcare was based on their experience of big companies. "If you asked most people if they wanted their local hospital to be managed by Serco, I think they would say no," she told a debate at the Public Procurement Live show...