Cash-strapped NHS trusts hand former PM Tony Blair’s tech pal Larry Ellison £1.5bn contract

Contracts worth £3 billion to create digital health records have been awarded to two US tech giants despite lower offers from UK-based suppliers, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The news comes as the US starts a global trade war that could plunge Britain into recession and amid claims the NHS is wasting taxpayers’ money on expensive foreign IT systems instead of buying British.

The Government last month abolished NHS England – described by Ministers as the ‘biggest quango in the world’ – in a bid to cut costs and curb red tape as it tries to mend the public finances. It has also introduced laws to make people’s medical records available online across all NHS hospitals, GP surgeries and ambulance services in England to deliver better care for patients.

One of the US giants involved in the expansion of electronic patient records (EPRs) is Oracle, whose founder Larry Ellison is the world’s fourth-richest man.

An analysis of EPR contracts awarded by healthcare trusts, many of which are in deficit, shows Oracle has won deals totalling more than £1.5 billion through its Cerner healthcare unit.

They include an £85 million deal with Sheffield Teaching Hospitals and a similar-sized contract with Oxford Health. Like many EPR projects, they have been dogged by delays with go-live dates deferred until bugs in the new IT system are sorted.

Beneficiary: Larry Ellison, Oracle’s tech chief, has a $182 billion fortune

Some of the biggest contracts have been given to Epic, another US tech company, which has won about £1.6 billion of deals in total.

The largest is a £450 million deal with Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospitals to roll out EPR software across their London hospitals. One trust chief dismissed this as ‘chicken feed’ compared with the NHS total spend.

Epic also has £181 million and £200 million deals with Manchester University and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS foundation trusts respectively.

Epic and Oracle-Cerner are the most expensive EPR providers, with trusts spending an average £4.3 million and £2.9 million a month on each respectively, according to Paul Brown, who runs a healthcare IT consultancy.

‘I appreciate Epic and Cerner are huge and they do a lot, but is it really worth paying two or three times more than for another solution? Are patient outcomes two or three times better?’ Brown asked.

Two years ago the NHS sparked controversy by handing the US spy tech company Palantir a £330 million contract to create a huge data platform, leading to privacy concerns around patients’ medical details.

Former health secretary Steve Barclay has said NHS bosses could save money, cut waiting lists and improve clinical outcomes by hiring local suppliers.

Singling out the huge expenditure on EPR, he said last month that the Government needed ‘to stop spending money on overseas companies that are not committed to the NHS, and prioritise British business’.

Cutting waste ‘needs to ensure value for money for the taxpayer’, added Barclay, who was health secretary under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

A report by the Tony Blair Institute think-tank, which was set up by the former prime minister and which is funded by Larry Ellison’s charitable foundation, said creating a single record that would contain all of a patient’s health and care data would ‘drive improvements to health and care, and ensure that the NHS is ready for the artificial intelligence era’.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said it would ‘ensure every penny of taxpayers’ money was maximised’.

Epic said it was for NHS trusts to say why they had chosen a particular IT provider. Oracle was contacted for comment.