GP software supplier Silicon Practice is to be paid £160,000 by NHS England to transfer or close its services in a managed way
Silicon Practice, a tech GP software company is receiving payments from the NHS to transfer its data, websites and online consultation services for two weeks, after the company went into administration.
As its contract notice cited ‘extreme urgency’ in funding on 16 February, by 27th of February the company entered administration and was immediately acquired by the school and healthcare app provider Schappit, which trades as Piota.
Outside usual procurement procedures, the funding was designed to cover two weeks of costs maintaining Silicon Practice’s GP software services “in order to enable a managed wind down and/or hand over of services”.
“[This] would have had a detrimental effect on patient care”
The NHS noted in a contract award notice in March: “The company is in financial difficulty and administrators had recommended immediate cessation of software services to their general practice customers. This would have disrupted the provision of general practice services to patients and would have had a detrimental effect on patient care.
“Schappit Ltd will continue to deliver services to existing Silicon Practice customers without disruption and will retain the Silicon Practice name and branding.”
Emergency funding provided by the NHS
Now, NHS England has carried out business prospects with Schappit as a supplier for GP software under its online and video consultation framework.
With its commercial delivery team becoming involved, organisations have time to migrate. However, this migration progress showed some organisations providing GP software had been charged seven times more than their contracts in documents seen by PublicTechnology.
The emergency funding provided by the NHS comes months after Cabinet Office provided financial support to keep public sector cloud specialist UKCloud running last October when the company entered liquidation, but now, all of UKCloud’s former customers had moved to other suppliers, as revealed in a statement published by the Insolvency Service.
