By Andy McCue, 16 September 2004 17:00
NEWS The NHS' £6bn IT programme will merely provide the kind of bog standard automation familiar to the private sector for a decade by excluding innovative small and medium sized IT vendors, according to new research.
The claims are made in the Wireless eHealth and the National Programme for IT white paper by UK-based consultancy Wireless Healthcare.
"The applications that make up the NPfIT, while regarded as revolutionary by the NHS, will merely provide the level of automation most large commercial organisations have been enjoying for almost a decade," the report said.
Smaller IT suppliers are finding themselves being dropped by their "evangelistic" early adopters within the NHS who now have to toe the line with "risk averse" local service providers (LSPs) responsible for the regional implementation of the national e-booking and electronic patient records.
The white paper suggests that smaller and more innovative suppliers should form alliances to offer bundles of healthcare applications that would be more attractive to the LSPs than a confusing selection of individual products.
"An alliance of vendors would find it easier to negotiate with the companies that have already won contracts to supply the NHS with IT infrastructure," the report said.
There is also a warning that as applications are deployed and pressure builds for the NHS to use IT to cut costs, the NPfIT will encounter resistance from NHS staff.
"Technology such as wireless tagging of patients, blood plasma packs and medicine bottles - which reduces medical errors - should be welcomed with open arms by medical staff. It will be less popular however if it is used to identify the members of staff who are responsible for those errors," the report said.
Comments
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1. Andrew Barratt
Having had to research this subject quite thoroughly recently for a presentation. Ive read almost every major white paper on NHS reform thats been released since 1989. Whilst the technology could be just described as Enterprise Automation or Workflow that has been used in larger companys for the last 10 years the NHS is actively pusueing a massive change of architecture moving to an overhaul service based architecture that is scalable in every direction. Many enterprises that have implemented the same kind of technolgy are now in a position where they are having to spend more money because they were tied to various venders and connectivity and have to ringfence there solutions in order to harness the benefits of XML-based standards. Corporations that have been using EDI for instance could save millions of £s by migrating their systems to webservice based systems. But there is an initial capital hit for them to do this. The NHS approach is innovative in that it will probably be the largest system of its kind based on Xml webservices, and due to the open standards, it doesnt matter that the implemenation of them is done in .NET, J2EE etc as the XML webservices cope with the interop. This gives the NHS options that enterprises who adopted automation technology in the past are now longing for.
Whilst it is unfortunate that some of the smaller vendors will lose out, such is the nature of business. Innovation doesnt on its own guarentee success. The teams involved are heavyweight contenders for the services. And as someone who is hoping to see good things happen to the NHS in future Im glad its gone that way. We need companies able to provide the resources that the NHS require. This kind of project was only ever going to go to the Logica,Accenture,IBMs of this world.
2. Karen Challinor
I don't mean to scaremonger here but whenever I read of these things in the commercial sector there's invariably an element of downsizing or smartsizing involved.
The wage bill comes down savings are made but there's not much improvement in service.
I hope that won't be the case with the NHS.
3. Dick Winchester
The other point about this contract is that regardless of who supplies it I would bet that close to 100% of the technology is not of UK origin. That is something that as a nation we should be thoroughly ashamed of and Government should be really concerned about but don't seem to be.
4. Neil Postlethwaite
Like the Scottish Parliment, it will be over budget, hideous to behold and in the best interests of government no-one will be responsible for anything that doesn't work/isn't delivered correctly.
The first comment mentions smaller suppliers shut out. Like EMIS that suppies about 50% of England and Wales GP Practice IT systems not being welcome........
Roll on the NAO report now, not in 10 years.