Countess of Chester Hospital commercial procurement services selects Lexmark

Lexmark International has been chosen by the Countess of Chester Hospital Commercial Procurement Services (COCH) as the single supplier on its new National Framework Agreement for the provision of Healthcare Content Management.

This new Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) compliant call off framework provides Lexmark with a competitive edge by allowing the company to sell all of its solutions directly into the NHS and other public sector bodies, without the need for further competition or lengthy procurement processes.

Within healthcare organisations, valuable clinical content is often stored away in departmental systems, locked away from clinical users of other departments who could make use of that content to improve patient treatment.

Lexmark Healthcare has brought together industry-leading technologies to create healthcare content management (HCM) — a modular, enterprise strategy that allows organisations to securely capture, manage, view and share this vital information.

This agreement is hot on the heels of the announcement that the Government has set aside £4 billion for the NHS to urgently digitalise and meet paperless challenge targets by 2020. The framework is specifically designed to address the access, routing and managing of complex clinical data from a single virtual access point. Lexmark are now able to work directly with individual NHS authorities to tailor solutions allowing them to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Andrew O’Connor, director of commercial procurement services at Countess of Chester NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Our framework allows all NHS trusts to quickly and compliantly access Lexmark’s unique offering and integrate digital and physical clinical content. The solution combines hardware and software platforms and is ideally placed to support the NHS’s drive towards interoperability and paperless working environments.”

Sunny Lee, managing director of Lexmark Global Services, UK & Ireland, added: “The UK Healthcare marketplace is experiencing a time of unprecedented change and financial pressures. Lexmark's solutions offer an unrivalled platform to support the drive towards process optimisation and a paperless environment.”