Credit: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

NHS Digital has paid supplier Accenture £45.3million for a two-year extension of its contract to provide NHSmail, the managed Microsoft-based email service with around 1.7m users. This brings the total value of the procurement since June 2015 to £160.8m.

In a contract modification notice, NHS Digital said that the first five years of the contract had cost £115.6m including all contract variations, having previously published estimates for the value. This is slightly below the minimum estimated cost of the contract in the original 2014 procurement notice of £120m to £350m.

NHS Digital said that it has extended Accenture’s contract to provide the service until 21 March 2023. Modifications since June 2020 have included changes caused by the introduction of integrated care systems (ICSs), leading to alterations in the English NHS’s organisation data service (ODS) codes and users moving organisations, in some cases with health services bodies being split between different ICSs. “The data will also need to flow appropriately between the organisations and would need to be ‘rehomed’ within the NHSmail portal to the new ODS code,” it wrote.

In 2020, NHSmail user accounts were moved from Microsoft’s Exchange 2013 mail server to Exchange Online and NHS Digital offered users free access to Microsoft’s Teams collaboration service to support remote working during the pandemic.

NHS Digital, currently an executive non-departmental public body officially known as the Health and Social Care Information Centre, will move into the transformation directorate of NHS England and Improvement following a review by Laura Wade-Gery in November 2021. The Department of Health and Social Care recently published a framework agreement to manage this process.