iB Solutions wins €2.2m contract with 16 NHS trusts

Dublin-based iB Solutions, an IBA subsidiary, has this month won five contracts with 16 NHS trusts worth a total of £1.75m (€22.m) for its Integra range of financial and purchasing applications.

A consortium of five NHS trusts in Greater Manchester, supported by the North West Collaborative Procurement hub, has agreed a four-year contract for a bureau service from the group’s data centre at Prestwich in Manchester.

Bolton Hospital, Christie Hospital, University Hospitals of South Manchester, and Salford Hospital are existing Integra customers.

Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Trust is switching from its current Mentec system to Integra and will also act as the development site for a budgeting and planning module due for completion in September.

Eamonn Morris, managing director of iB Solutions, said: "The contract was won in an open tender and reflects the increasing popularity of fully managed services to deliver a low risk and highly cost effective solution to the NHS."

Birmingham Shared Service - a consortium of six NHS organisations - will implement the Integra suite of web-enabled financial and purchasing applications.

An existing bureau customer, Birmingham will also replace its Version One document management and imaging system with Integra for automatic scanning, recognition, storage, archiving, and retrieval of documents.

Almost two-thirds of all iB Solutions' customers have moved to electronic storage of documents, which reflects the importance of this solution for delivery efficiency and cost savings.

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is upgrading its Integra applications and taking a new OCR scanning solution. By eliminating the need for manual data entry, Integra OCR increases efficiency and cuts costs.

Three primary care trusts (PCTs) in Nottinghamshire are also buying the scanning and electronic invoice approval solution.

Nottingham County, Nottingham City, and Bassetlaw PCTs operate a local shared service and will also use a new web-enabled management information module.

The PCT’s have many sites across a large geographical area so it was important to be able to deliver reports and documents over the network to save both time and money.

iB Solutions’ web deployment software offers significant savings and quick payback, and reflects the increasing trend towards web-solutions for these types of organisations.

A mental health trust in the West Midlands has also agreed a three-year contract for Integra.

Integra Enterprise is widely used within the public and private sector in the UK and Ireland with more than 250 installations covering all sizes of organisations.

Integra offers all the functionality associated with a finance application such as general ledger, integrated purchasing, creditors, sundry debtors and stock control as well providing key business functionality including integrated business intelligence, document management, workflow for routing of authorisation requests, online real-time processing of data, budget modelling and performance indicators.