EPES, CFU and Ophthalmic applications support, upgrade and hardware refresh

In June 2008, the Electronic Prescribing and Eligibility System (EPES) went live. The objective of the project was to capture prescription information from Community Pharmacies into a central EPES Database. This system was introduced to speed up pharmacy re-payments, allow for closer scrutiny of the prescribing and dispensing process, and reduce lost income through patients falsely claiming to be in receipt of a qualifying Social Security benefit.

Following its successful launch, EPES was extended to support Dental and Ophthalmic claims processing, the DOP system. This DAC will ensure continuity of services for the Family Practitioner System Team.

Failure to provision the extended support places BSO at serious risk of an application failure from which we would be unable to recover from. Contractor payments of approximately £576m per annum would be defaulted on and there would also be a risk of fraud as it would be impossible to process prescriptions and estimate payments manually.

DXC Technology will support the EPES systems for BSO. The scope of this Contract includes:

• Planning and project management.

• Procurement and support of 8 new workstations and scanners.

• Assistance from DXC and Kodak Alaris to setup new workstations with the Kodak Alaris Kodak Info Input scanning software.

• Health checks.

• Perform renewal of the existing labor support contract.

• Extension of Kodak support contract

• Recompile of code to make it supportable.

• ​Upgrade to Windows 11.

£1,080,186 has been previously directed awarded to DXC for support, maintenance, and upgrade works to support the EPES system. It is our intention to complete a further Direct Award to the value of £5,500,000 (exclusive of VAT).