The OEM has been awarded the three-year contract by the NHS, and will “manage the production and printing” for the health service’s secure forms.
PrintWeek reported on the contract, worth £40 million ($62 million/€56 million), which will enable Xerox to provide MPS to the NHS’ (National Health Service) Business Services Authority (NHSBSA). The contract covers the management of “production and printing” in terms of “millions of secure and non-secure business forms”, and was awarded through the UK’s Crown Commercial Service (CCS).
The agreement was signed in April, and went live on 1 July, with Xerox taking responsibility for the printing of around “800 million prescription forms each year”, as well as dental and operational forms, for the NHS in both England and Wales. A secure printing site has been set up in Huddersfield, Yorkshire in partnership with secure communications provider Adare, which includes a secure litho press, and six new staff will be hired to work there.
The UK government’s Department of Health has been trying to make the health service paperless, with the plans first announced two years ago, with “billions” in savings expected alongside improving services and meeting “challenges presented by the UK’s ageing population”. A “significant part” of the agreement will see Xerox “look to identify new ways to transform the NHS’ document supply chain” including “remov[ing] duplicate business processes and secur[ing] cost and time savings”.
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The non-secure side of the agreement will see Xerox “migrating processes from a physical to digital format where appropriate”, including dental and operational forms. The digitisation of patient notes will also “free up ward time to focus on patient care and enable decisions to be made in a clinical environment to improve patient safety”, while information “can be made available in multiple places at one time”.
Brendan Brown, NHSBSA Head of Service, commented: “When dealing with secure documents it’s important to closely monitor their progress from conception to delivery. As a result we needed a service that ensures zero disruption to the provision of clinically critical NHS forms, coupled with careful consideration of security and time efficiency. Xerox provides exactly the expertise we need.”
Darren Cassidy, Managing Director of Xerox UK, added: “This contract is about understanding the specific needs of the health service and working together with the NHSBSA to manage productivity and security concerns. While initial roll-out looks solely at printing paper documents more efficiently, we look forward to identifying new ways to transform the NHSBSA’s document supply chain.
“It can’t be denied that making this shift to digitise and transition paper-based processes is a lengthy and fairly complex one; a journey we’re still right at the beginning of, with many steps ahead. Attempting to migrate all paper practices online at once is likely to result in more confusion and prove damaging to productivity. In many cases, it’s less about being completely paperless, and more about functioning with less paper. A fundamental first step towards fulfilling the NHS’ less-paper goal, therefore, is to ensure the security and confidentiality of new digital documents.
“The provision of a secure managed print service – and the creation of digital repositories for patient information – can help achieve this.”