NHS shakes up £12bn IT programme
A big revamp of the National Health Service’s £12bn IT programme is under way that will see NHS trusts given more choice of how systems are installed and which software they get.
At the same time the Department of Health is launching a review of the information it collects from the service, aiming to gather less but use what it gets far better.
The department persistently refuses to say that the £12bn programme is formally under review. But senior figures in Connecting for Health were expecting the announcement of a review to go alongside Lord Darzi’s interim report last week on the “next stage” of the NHS.
That appears to have been pulled amid the general election fever for fear it would generate headlines about the government admitting mistakes over the multi-billion-pound 10-year programme.
However, one senior health department official said a study was under way to establish “will this actually work?” The big local service provider contracts held by CSC, BT and Fujitsu are being moved out of Connecting for Health, an arm of the health department, to local level in the NHS, he said.
He added that “a big step change is that we will give people more choice” about what systems are installed in hospitals, to go alongside the wider choice of systems being offered to GPs.
One of the main problems, he said, had been that “we have forced people to take systems that were either worse than those they had already got, or were ones that they didn’t want”.
As a result, installation of new patient administration systems that are needed to underpin the long delayed electronic patient record are themselves also running way behind schedule.
Instead contractors are expected to let hospitals locally choose from “best of breed” applications that suit their local circumstances, while remaining compliant with the communication standards that the national programme has set.
The big contractors are also accepting that they will have to give individual NHS trusts more support to get the systems in.
One effect of the change, according to programme insiders, is likely to be more concentration on getting local systems up and running, and less on the national summary record, which many clinicians see as having little relevance.
The move follows a call from the Commons health select committee last! month for hospitals to be offered a wider choice of systems.
From:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/89fba648-7399-11dc-abf0-0000779fd2ac.html
Yippee Doo. A full eighteen months after Health Direct warned of the impending IT disaster, (April 17, 2006) Health Direct posted Anatomy of a £15bn gamble- CfH's NHS IT busted flush
The new NHS computer system could be the biggest IT disaster in history, warn experts. Inside a leading hospital in Oxford, expensive new computers were humming away just before Christmas when disaster struck.
The Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre was at the forefront of a multi-billion-pound revolution to modernise the entire computer system of the National Health Service — and the screens had suddenly frozen.
Although the system was functioning again the next day, some patient files seemed to have disappeared completely. The trust was so alarmed that it sent a report to the National Patient Safety Agency, warning that it had posed a potential risk to patients.
Even CfH admitted that the cost of the scheme, now not due to be completed until 2010, could reach £15 billion. Outside experts suggest that £30 billion is more realistic.
At the same time the Department of Health is launching a review of the information it collects from the service, aiming to gather less but use what it gets far better.
The department persistently refuses to say that the £12bn programme is formally under review. But senior figures in Connecting for Health were expecting the announcement of a review to go alongside Lord Darzi’s interim report last week on the “next stage” of the NHS.
That appears to have been pulled amid the general election fever for fear it would generate headlines about the government admitting mistakes over the multi-billion-pound 10-year programme.
However, one senior health department official said a study was under way to establish “will this actually work?” The big local service provider contracts held by CSC, BT and Fujitsu are being moved out of Connecting for Health, an arm of the health department, to local level in the NHS, he said.
He added that “a big step change is that we will give people more choice” about what systems are installed in hospitals, to go alongside the wider choice of systems being offered to GPs.
One of the main problems, he said, had been that “we have forced people to take systems that were either worse than those they had already got, or were ones that they didn’t want”.
As a result, installation of new patient administration systems that are needed to underpin the long delayed electronic patient record are themselves also running way behind schedule.
Instead contractors are expected to let hospitals locally choose from “best of breed” applications that suit their local circumstances, while remaining compliant with the communication standards that the national programme has set.
The big contractors are also accepting that they will have to give individual NHS trusts more support to get the systems in.
One effect of the change, according to programme insiders, is likely to be more concentration on getting local systems up and running, and less on the national summary record, which many clinicians see as having little relevance.
The move follows a call from the Commons health select committee last! month for hospitals to be offered a wider choice of systems.
From:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/89fba648-7399-11dc-abf0-0000779fd2ac.html
Yippee Doo. A full eighteen months after Health Direct warned of the impending IT disaster, (April 17, 2006) Health Direct posted Anatomy of a £15bn gamble- CfH's NHS IT busted flush
The new NHS computer system could be the biggest IT disaster in history, warn experts. Inside a leading hospital in Oxford, expensive new computers were humming away just before Christmas when disaster struck.
The Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre was at the forefront of a multi-billion-pound revolution to modernise the entire computer system of the National Health Service — and the screens had suddenly frozen.
Although the system was functioning again the next day, some patient files seemed to have disappeared completely. The trust was so alarmed that it sent a report to the National Patient Safety Agency, warning that it had posed a potential risk to patients.
Even CfH admitted that the cost of the scheme, now not due to be completed until 2010, could reach £15 billion. Outside experts suggest that £30 billion is more realistic.
Labels: Commons-Health-Committee, Labour-waste, NHS fiasco, NPfIT
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