The first trials of a £325m NHS national administration system will go live in a Birmingham hospital in October.

The initiative will replace 28 payroll and 39 human resource (HR) systems across England and Wales. It will eliminate re-entry of staff details as they change jobs and provide NHS trust managers with strategic information to boost efficiency.

The benefits from an integrated information system should not be underestimated, says Viv Martin, HR/Payroll project manager for NHS Shared Services, which is running the project.

'Operationally it will make trusts leaner and more efficient, and any money they save can be re-deployed wherever it's needed,' he said.

'The system will have a reporting function so managers can understand the metrics of, say, staff sickness and look at solutions to address it.

'We only need to be able to save one day of sickness per employee per year and that would be equivalent to recruiting another 6000 staff.'

University Hospital Birmingham (UHB) is the test site for providing staff with an electronic record that will follow them as they move around the health service.

'This is a commercially available system so we know it works but the pilots are to test it in the NHS environment,' he said.

By May 2005 all trusts will be using the system.

The 10-year contract for the project was signed in December last year (Computing 13 December 2001) with a consortium of suppliers including McKesson, Oracle, PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM.