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By Andy McCue, 23 March 2005 17:35

NEWS The head of the NHS' £6.2bn IT programme has warned that failing suppliers will be ditched from the project over the next few months.

Richard Granger, director general of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the NHS, admitted in an interview with the Financial Times that some parts of the projects have experienced delays and that the suppliers responsible face being dropped.

"If suppliers cannot do the job, they will be replaced. Some of that will occur over the next few months," he said.

Granger would not name the failing contractors but said it is not any of the four main local service providers - Accenture, BT, CSC and Fujitsu - building the necessary IT infrastructure in the five regions around the country.

The strict penalty clauses for failing to meet targets were a sticking point for many suppliers during the procurement phase of the programme.

The government also announced today it had bowed to pressure from GPs for a wider choice of surgery computer systems and finally included Emis on the list of eligible suppliers after a long stand-off. Emis has signed a contract with local service provider CSC for the North West and Midlands.

Emis had been in deadlock with the government for the last year after declaring the NHS IT contracts too risky and untenable and claiming it was being unfairly excluded from the NPfIT despite being the dominant supplier of computer systems to GP surgeries in England.

A spokesman for the Department for Health would only say that no "substantive changes" had been made to the general NPfIT contract framework for the Emis deal while CSC said it had taken a pragmatic approach and used only the contract terms from the NPfIT that were appropriate for Emis.

Andrew Spence, applications director for the CSC Alliance, told silicon.com: "We have reached a balance. I don't believe that we are taking on risk that Emis should rightly bear and I think Emis has taken a pragmatic approach too."

Emis did not have any detailed comment on the deal but said its position has always been that it could not sign any contract that was untenable or uninsurable.

The government has also revealed that the not so catchily titled NPfIT is to change its name to 'Connecting for Health', although it appears to have overlooked the fact there is already a health IT organisation by the same name in the US.