County Durham and Tees NHS Trusts have signed a contract with Wax Digital to provide an e-procurement solution to manage £350m in annual expenditure across 7,000 users.

The consortium - comprising a mixture of NHS Trusts, Foundation Trusts, Primary Care Trusts and HM Prisons – will deploy a service allowing them to tender, purchase and invoice all their purchases electronically.

"The systems will allow the Consortium to remain at the forefront of e-Business technology within the NHS," said Malcolm Preston, associate director of procurement, County Durham Procurement Consortium.

“We wanted to give our professional procurement specialists the ability to negotiate and manage key supplier contracts, update electronic product catalogues and match invoices to orders, reducing remaining manual processes and giving clear financial visibility of spend across the organisations,” he said.

The consortium has more than 3,000 active suppliers, supplying everything from high technology medical equipment and surgical consumables to non-medical products and services for all Durham and Tees NHS Trusts.