By Steve Ranger, 19 January 2006 14:25
NEWS
Choose and Book
The Electronic Booking Service - known as Choose and Book - allows GPs to make hospital appointments at a convenient time for patients.
The idea is that when patients need to be referred to a consultant they can book the appointment on the spot with their GP. Alternatively they can do it online or on the phone.
The system aims to cut the lengthy delays, often lasting weeks, between visiting the GP and receiving an appointment from a hospital.
What progress so far?
Choose and Book has been subject to long delays - finally coming into service a year later than expected. It has also been criticised by the people in charge of the project.
NHS Connecting for Health told silicon.com: "The NHS is continuing to roll out Choose and Book locally."
It said that as at close of business on 13 January 2006, 7,012 GP practices had the technical capability to access and use Choose and Book out of a total of just over 8,500 practices.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Um, interesting. Some points raised differ from what the reality.
Trusts are being pushed into CRS with no reguard to existing functionality or cost of moving to the new system.
Choose and Book is a complete failure, with all rollouts being stopped in our area, and existing users being told that they can stop using the system if they want to.
The N3 rollout success depends on what you mean by connected. BT have a different meaning of that phrase than most.
PACS is in, and working with a few glitches. The project was painfull however.
Setting users up on the Spine is a slow and painfull business, with a lot of resistance from users.
The Contact email system is slow and clumbersom, and not very user friendly.
You have missed of a few major national projects, such as the Electronic Staff Record, Shares Business Service and Integrated Comunity Equipment Services, all heading for their own show stopping problems if we're not carefull.
Overall, a nightmare for NHS IT Staff.
2. anonymous
Haven't seen any evidence of this in use yet.
3. matthew
How do you find out which IT companies are involved in these NHS -IT projects like choose and book? there seems to be problems with payment that is affecting accenture, but i can't find out or see who the other companies affected are - so its hard to judge if its bad NHS management of projects, or poor delivery by the companies that is the problem?
what does everyone else think on this issue?