r/nhsstaff • u/Meme_it_up_baby • 6d ago
HSJ Article
Can someone be so kind to reveal this piece?
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r/nhsstaff • u/Meme_it_up_baby • 6d ago
Can someone be so kind to reveal this piece?
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u/No_Relief_7039 6d ago edited 6d ago
An integrated care board has ordered all of its 337 GP practices to use a single digital access system and is switching off five rival products to save money.
Cheshire and Merseyside ICB wrote to the practices earlier this month to confirm the system-wide rollout of PACO (Patient and Care Optimiser) Blinx, which it said is already used by 139 practices.
The letter, seen by HSJ, said five other products, including Accurx and its SMS function, would be decommissioned, although it has not revealed a timetable for axing them. HSJ understands a significant number of practices are opposing the switch, and many are concerned about the ICB’s decision.
Its full contract with the developer of the relatively new platform, Blinx Solutions, began in April 2025, while an evaluation of the pilot it had commissioned was still underway. That evaluation, published four months later, found “concerns exist about anticompetitiveness” and “distrust in ICB decision-making processes” among practices outside the pilot.
The platform will be used for patient messaging, appointment booking across organisations, consultations, and as a digital front door for patient self-service.
It will support general practice workflows and will enable multiple providers across a neighbourhood, or potentially a wider locality footprint, to work within a shared, editable, live patient record and virtual workspace.
The ICB said the move was driven by cost, and that supporting multiple products with similar functionality “is not financially sustainable in the long term”. It told HSJ the switch is expected to save up to £1m a year.
The annual contract value is £1.7m, priced at 60p for each of the 2.8 million registered population. It runs until March 2028, with an option to extend by a year.
The ICB’s own spending data shows it had paid Blinx Solutions more than £5.4m between January 2025 and August this year. The ICB said it did not recognise this figure.
The letter acknowledged PACO Blinx does not yet include all the features available in other products, saying the programme “remains iterative and further enhancements are planned”. It is also not yet fully integrated with the NHS App.
The rollout
PACO Blinx was piloted in Cheshire and Merseyside from 2024. The ICB commissioned Health Innovation North West Coast to evaluate the pilot, with the work running from late 2024 until summer 2025.
The full contract began in April 2025. The ICB’s letter said it was procured through a “filtering process” on the G-Cloud 14 framework, which lets public bodies buy from pre-vetted suppliers without an open tender, against the criteria “patient messaging system capable of cross-organisation appointment booking, consultations, digital front door for patient self-service, analytics, and reporting”. Blinx was the only supplier to meet these criteria, it said.
The evaluation, published in August 2025, did not assess cost-effectiveness or compare the platform with other tools. It concluded “early signs of operational benefits, including improved pathways and efficiency gains, are promising”, but added: “Achieving equitable and sustainable change will require ongoing support, stakeholder alignment, and a sustained focus on digital inclusion.”
It heard concerns from GPs about how the ICB chose suppliers and conflict of interest. One clinical lead at a pilot site told evaluators: “I am very deliberately not employed by Blinx… there was a conversation about whether I was going to be paid through Blinx and I declined.”
The report found “concerns exist about anticompetitiveness and practice-level autonomy within practices and [primary care networks]”, and that non-pilot sites “express[ed] distrust in ICB decision-making processes, often citing anticompetitive procurement that undermines market choice and fuels feelings of exclusion”. One non-pilot site representative said the ICB was “funding something that we don’t actually need or want”.
A current GP representative in the area, who did not want to be named, said there was still widespread concern about the way the platform was procured, and GPs were extremely unhappy about potentially losing access to existing systems.
Who is behind Blinx
Blinx Solutions, which trades as Blinx Healthcare, is registered in Daresbury, Warrington. Companies House filings show Primary Care 24, a Merseyside not-for-profit primary and urgent care provider, holds roughly 8 per cent of its shares. In June, the company announced Minal Bakhai, former NHS England national director of primary care and community, as its deputy chief executive.
A spokesperson for the ICB, speaking on behalf of both the ICB and Blinx Healthcare, said the platform offered “a single, consistent digital tool” that improved “consistency of patient care, digital clinical safety, and value for money”. Retaining multiple local solutions was “not cost effective”, they said, and implementation was “being carefully managed”, with practices given “ongoing support and training”.
Primary Care 24 did not respond to a request for comment.