Barts Health NHS Trust has turned to Capgemini to help modernise its ICT estate using the cloud.

The three-year agreement will see Capgemini work across all five hospitals in the Trust, rolling out end-to-end cloud services across sites in Central and East London. One of the largest in the country, the Trust manages hospitals in Mile End, Whipps Cross, and Newham, as well as the Royal London and St Bartholomew’s hospitals.

The aim is to modernise the Trust’s existing estate, shifting away from legacy systems in favour of cloud technologies. That includes the assessment and migration of mission-critical workloads to different cloud providers, as well as wider management tools and security systems, Capgemini said.

«As the largest NHS Trust, and one of the pioneers in taking a step towards modernising its IT infrastructure through migrating the services to the cloud, the Trust will benefit from a more secure, scalable and agile operating environment that is more cost effective than current legacy IT infrastructure,» said Matt Howell, head of Public Sector at Capgemini in the UK.

The move is part of wider plans to modernise Barts’ technology to benefit patients and staff, said Sarah Jensen, CIO of Barts Health Trust. «With their existing experience in providing cloud hosting services and digital transformation solutions to the NHS, we are excited about the journey we have started together and are confident our partnership will continue to add value in our ever-challenging environment which ultimately leads to better care for patients.»

The deal follows last year’s efforts to build a Cloud Solutions Framework to make it easier to find suppliers for NHS and other public-sector organisations; Capgemini UK is one of the suppliers listed in the framework. The framework has four different lots — covering everything from consultancy to end-to-end cloud — with a handful of suppliers in each.

«The result is a specialist pool of 24 leading suppliers, which provide the greatest expertise and value-for-money to the public sector,” said Phil Davies, procurement director at NHS Shared Business Services, at the time.