NHS England has set out plans for a ‘Tiger Teams’ service to support the delivery of electronic patient records (EPRs) in the health service.
It has published a procurement notice for support as part of its Frontline Digitisation (FD) programme, which involves all healthcare providers having EPRs in place by the end of March 2026.
It wants a partner to create a rapid response intervention service, named Tiger Teams, to support the delivery of the technology. This will expand on existing support.
The notice says it is currently expected that the service will involve a framework agreement for a single supplier or consortium, with a set of deliverables for each work package determined by what is needed by individual NHS trusts. This comes with a budget of around £16 million.
Big challenge
It adds: “Often during EPR delivery, there is a requirement for either a planned, or unplanned, specific, time-bound skill set, capable of providing a set of deliverables, problem rectification or other specialist intervention for an element of the EPR programme. Trusts are finding it increasingly challenging to obtain good quality, skilled short term resources, both from the recruitment and contingent labour market.
“To support trusts to alleviate this issue, this service will provide Tiger Teams, defined as a group of highly skilled, experienced resources, commissioned to deliver a time-boxed service on behalf of the trust where other attempts to fulfil the requirement have been unsuccessful.”
Among the requirements for the supplier is to build up cells of operators that could be deployed across the system, transfer the relevant knowledge to NHS teams and support the setting up of a virtual centre of excellence.
The move is aimed at supporting the deployment of EPRs within a minority of hospital trusts that are struggling to get them in place, and to extend their use in other settings. In November of last year NHS England reported that it had met the Government’s target of having them in place in 90% of hospital trusts as part of the Digital plan for health and social care.
