Sema loses NHS contract to SMS

King's Healthcare Trust has cast out Sema Group and plumped instead for the US health systems giant SMS as the supplier of its new patient administration system (PAS).

The decision will disappoint Siemens Nixdorf, which had been considered favourite in the race for the contract.

The trust, based at King's College Hospital in London, was the pilot site for Sema's PAS system.

SMS hit trouble last year when Northern General Hospital threatened arbitration over system problems.

But King's Healthcare Trust's director of information services, Mark Herbert, said: 'SMS was the clear winner on quality and price.'

Sema Group had been running the old King's College Hospital ICL PAS system under an outsourcing contract for many years. The latest contract covers a new implementation of SMS' system. It will be worth #300,000 to #400,000 over a three-year period.

SMS will run the operation from its Manchester data centre, and will run a help desk and a second-level IRC PAS system.

'We were originally running a fully managed service, but King's has taken most of that back in-house,' a spokesman for Sema said.