The largest health IT project to date for France, the creation of a unique patient record for the l'Assistance Publique, Hôpitaux de Paris (APHP) also is a complex health information program, expected to stretch over five years and valued at $142 million.

Ultimately the system will have 72,000 users sharing patient records across 43 clinics and facilities in the Parisian hospital network.

The contract calls for the system to be operating within two years and fully realized at the end of the five-year agreement.

Agfa Healthcare (Mortsel, Belgium) says it has won the contract that is set to be signed before the end of the month, leading a consortium made up of Capgemini (Paris), Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto, California) and Oracle Healthcare EMEA (London/Paris).

Given the history of the project, even when the ink is dry on Oct 1 Agfa is not guaranteed a success story.

The first call for proposals was issued in 2005 by APHP and a contract finally awarded in 2007 to a consortium led by Thales (Paris) that included GE Healthcare (Waukesha, Wisconsin) and Medasys (Gif-sur-Yvette, France).

APHP canceled the agreement before the end of that year to avoid becoming locked into the partnership, citing the inability of the consortium to define the project in a timely manner as required. APHP would be obliged to cancel the contract again before the end of this year if it is not satisfied with the Agfa consortium's performance to terms of the agreement.

Agfa dropped its partner, Accenture France (Paris), to team up with CapGemini for this second proposal round.

The second Agfa bid for the work was not the lowest at €100 million ($142 million). Cerner/IBM valued the work at €90 million ($128.5 million), while the open-source offer from Atos Origin was placed at €75 million ($107 million).

Medasys may have dropped out of the competition, but remains a player, with three APHP hospitals running its DxCare software and 47 French hospitals outside the Paris region adopting its programs and a clear preference with APHP that gave the contract to Thales on the strength of the Medasys software and interface.

In May, Medasys reported that it had entered into a strategic partnership with SAP (Waldorf, Germany) to offer a more complete system integrating its clinical and patient reporting functions with the large business and administration functions of French hospitals.

The APHP system is expected to be a breakthrough development in France's thus-far-disastrous effort to create a DMP, which has had a split definition between the personal patient health record, the Dossier Medical Personalis&eacute, and the patient record to be shared by medical professionals for diagnosis and treatment, the Dossier Medical Partag&eacute (Medical Device Daily, June 9, 2008).

— John Brosky, European Editor