Report reveals electronic care records project failure
Summary
The Committee of Public Accounts believes that the initiative to create a fully integrated electronic care records system in the National Health Service (NHS) has been a highly expensive disappointment.
The report, 'The National Programme for IT in the NHS: an Update on the Delivery of Detailed Care Records Systems’ (HC 1070), finds that the central part of an ambitious £11.4 billion investment programme has not delivered its original vision despite costing over £7 billion.
The Department of Health is now relying on individual NHS trusts to develop systems compatible with those in the Programme.
Furthermore, the Department could not explain how potential inconsistencies would be dealt with or what it will cost local NHS organisations to connect up.
The Department has not got the best out of its suppliers, despite having paid them some £1.8 billion so far.
One supplier, the Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), has yet to deliver the bulk of the systems it is contracted to supply and has instead implemented a large number of interim systems as a stopgap. The Department has been in negotiations with CSC for over a year, but conceded that it may be more expensive to terminate the contract than to complete it.
The Department has also revised its contract with British Telecom (BT), reducing the number of systems and increasing the price for each system delivered. This has resulted in BT being paid £9 million to implement systems at each NHS site, even though the same systems have been purchased for under £2 million by NHS organisations outside the Programme.
The Committee is further concerned about the problems in getting timely and reliable information from the Department. Information provided has frequently been late, has contained inconsistencies and has contradicted other evidence.
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