NHS England has increased the value of its "tiger teams" contract by £6.4m over the next six months, extending a consultancy arrangement designed to help hospital trusts that are struggling to implement electronic patient record systems.

The tiger teams framework was established under the national Frontline Digitisation programme, which requires NHS secondary care providers to reach a minimum level of digital capability and put electronic patient records into full operation. The teams are made up of specialists deployed on a short term, hands on basis to trusts that have been unable to resolve implementation problems using their own resources.

KPMG was awarded the original tiger teams contract in May 2025, worth an estimated £13.3m, to run until March 2026. The contract had already been extended once, with an optional twelve month extension taken up in January this year, pushing the end date to March 2027. The latest £6.4m addition builds on that arrangement, adding further funding for the coming six months.

The teams are intended to address specific, time critical problems, ranging from software integration failures to gaps in operational readiness, where local NHS management has not been able to resolve delays on its own. According to the original contract documentation, the service was designed to provide "hands-on, boots-on-ground interventions" and to draw on specialists with organisational knowledge of best practice in electronic patient record design, delivery and optimisation.

Deployment has focused on acute, mental health and secondary care trusts identified as being at risk of missing the government's EPR targets. Trusts named in connection with the programme when the original contract was awarded included Blackpool Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust, Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust, the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital Foundation Trust, Sherwood Forest Hospitals Foundation Trust, Stockport Foundation Trust, University Hospitals Liverpool Group and University Hospitals Sussex Foundation Trust.

The programme sits within the wider Frontline Digitisation initiative, which has been reported as carrying a total value of around £1.9 billion, aimed at ensuring all NHS trusts reach the required standard of digital capability by the government's stated deadline.

The latest funding increase reflects continued reliance on external consultancy support to keep digital transformation projects on schedule. Contract notices for the tiger teams service have described electronic patient record implementation as notoriously complex, citing persistent difficulty among some trusts in accessing the skilled short term resources needed to deliver these systems internally.

The extension also points to an intended knowledge transfer element built into the original contract design, under which the supplier was expected to build up a cohort of specialists capable of being deployed across the system, with the stated aim of creating a more sustainable resourcing model over time. It is not yet clear how far that ambition has been realised in practice, given the repeated need for further external funding to keep the intervention teams in place.

The expanded funding is set to run over the next six months, coinciding with trust level deadlines for digital compliance. The scale of ongoing spending on external advisory support is likely to prompt further questions from health policy analysts and patient groups about the long term cost of the approach, and about how much lasting capability is being built within the NHS itself as opposed to depending on repeated rounds of consultancy intervention.

NHS England has not set out publicly what would happen to trusts still lagging on EPR implementation once the current extension period ends, or whether further funding rounds for the tiger teams service should be expected beyond March 2027.

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