TCS expects Rs 1,000 crore billing from UK contract

Tata Consultancy Services expects to record billings in excess of £120 million (almost Rs 1,000 crore) from a contract awarded by the UK's National Health Services (NHS) to the Fujitsu-TCS alliance, over the nine-year contract period.

The TCS-Fujitsu consortium has clinched a pound 896 million contract to revamp the NHS' information technology infrastructure. The consortium, including IDX Systems Corp, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the BT Group, beat IBM, EDS and SchlumbergerSema to bag the deal.

IDX Systems will handle the core clinical applications, PricewaterhouseCoopers will do the security and training and the BT Group will do the systems integration. TCS will provide the clinical application implementation and data migration services.

The contract, which will run until 2013, is to operate the NHS'electronic patient care record in the south of England the largest region in the country, which covers almost a quarter of the population.

The alliance was appointed Local Service Provider by the NHS "in a drive to improve health care for patients in the southern regions of the country," TCS said in a media statement.

TCS, which was the only Indian company in the fray, will implement a part of this large project through TCS Lifescience and Healthcare Practice, currently a division.

"We look forward to working closely with our alliance partners and providing our expertise in data management and application implementation to meet the goals of the project," TCS said in the statement.

TCS Lifescience and Healthcare Practice provides comprehensive IT consulting and end-to-end IT solutions.

The deal is the final component of the pound 5 billion-plus NHS IT upgrade programme, which aims to link more than 50 million patient records.

Last year, BT, the UK telecommunications operator, was awarded contracts totalling pound 1.65 billion to provide the core of the patient record system, and to install and run the service in London.

Accenture, the IT consultancy group, won contracts worth pound 2.033 billion to run the system in the east and northeast of the country, while Computer Sciences Corporation, the US information services company, has a pound 974 million contract covering the northwest and Midlands.