ST. LOUIS – Two large healthcare organizations have opted to outsource portions of their information technology operations to enable them to focus on new clinical initiatives.Last month, Ascension Health, a St. Louis-based not-for-profit hospital system, signed a 10-year, $1.35 billion contract with Computer Sciences Corp., an El Segundo, Calif.-based IT services company. In a blockbuster deal announced earlier, Plano, Texas-based Perot Systems Corp. picked up contracts to manage Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. That combined contract is valued at $360 million over seven years.

The contracts represent another pair of large-dollar IT service contracts snared by outsource providers this year.

For Ascension Health, CSC will take on IT operations related to its enterprise-wide infrastructure, which includes helpdesk, network, security, telecommunication services as well as server, mainframe and desktop computing.

But Ascension Health, which operates 67 hospitals among its 80 facilities, will continue to manage strategic planning and make decisions on applications and operations, said Sherry Browne, senior vice president and CIO for the system.

"We'll continue to do all application development, such as Web development or clinical information systems," Browne said. "We keep all the application support."

Ascension Health tested CSC in a smaller service contract involving three of its hospitals and a small, shared data center, signed last year.

"We tested everything from culture compatibility to how they treat the employees, and we got to kick the tires on how to build a contract," Browne said. "Because of that, we feel very good about the contract."

Ascension Health has a lot of work ahead of it, as it seeks to move more clinical applications to Cerner Corp. technology, but faces challenges from short timelines and geographic dispersion.

In California, Perot Systems gains separate contracts with Stanford Hospitals and Clinics and Lucille Packard.

For Stanford, Perot's contract will involve application support and implementing an enterprise architecture solution. The facility hopes to redirect resources to implementing advanced clinical systems aimed at improving patient care, said Carolyn Byerly, its CIO.

At Lucille Packard, a children's hospital recently split from Stanford, Perot will provide data center and infrastructure services and help it implement an enterprise solution, said John F. McInally, its CIO, who experienced a change of heart during the vendor selection process.

"I was completely against outsourcing at the outset," he said. "It was a big change in thinking for me. We did a bakeoff with four competitors. The selling point for me was we would get gold-medal services at bronze prices. It would have been a bad business decision for me to not go with outsourcing."

Both California deals are outcomes-based, McInally said. The facilities now are benchmarking current performance, planning the move and putting procedures in place.