CSC has announced that it has signed a contract with Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust for a new program of work to outsource the trust’s technology services.

The 7-year agreement, with the option to extend to 10 years, means that CSC has day-to-day responsibility for hosting, developing and managing much of the trust’s IT and back-office processes. CSC will provide IT help desk, networking, infrastructure, desktop engineering, application development and support. It will also provide advice and support for a clinically driven health informatics function.

The program has a two-stage approach. It started with a transition and stabilization phase to move the service to CSC, which was completed earlier this summer and involved all of the trust’s IT services staff transferring to CSC. This has been followed by a coordinated transformation program, which will enhance and modernize the trust’s IT capabilities and support its scheduled move to a new electronic patient record system.

Sheri Thureen, president of U.K. Healthcare, CSC, sees this as a key milestone in the evolution of CSC’s healthcare business. “This contract with Royal Berkshire plays to CSC’s core strengths as a world-class provider of outsourced IT services and as a major provider of IT services to the NHS in England,” she said.