By Andy McCue, 12 September 2007 15:58
NEWS
The government's £12.4bn NHS IT project must be subject to an independent external audit to get it back on track and ensure the promised productivity benefits are delivered, Derek Wanless has warned.
Wanless delivered his verdict in a review of the progress made on the recommendations in his original 2002 report on the level of investment needed in the NHS over the next 20 years.
The new report claims that despite the increased level of investment in IT in the health service, the problems and delays with the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the NHS have the potential to seriously undermine the productivity gains Wanless envisaged back in 2002.
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The report said: "The extent to which the NHS will benefit from these substantial investments remains unclear."
Wanless said the substantial investment in NHS IT is not being adequately audited and evaluated and that it is difficult to obtain reliable data on NHS resources being committed to NPfIT.
Just £500,000 has so far been spent on evaluation and Wanless said Connecting for Health, the NHS agency responsible for the NPfIT, should be subject to "detailed external scrutiny and reporting".
The report said: "There seems a real risk that the costs and benefits of NPfIT will never be accurately assessed."
In particular Wanless singled out the lack of progress made on some of the core NHS IT projects including the electronic care record service and Choose and Book, and he warned the NPfIT contracts risk creating monopolies by using only two major software suppliers.
Wanless concluded in the report: "It is clear that there are considerable challenges ahead in modernising NHS IT systems, and continuing debate over the feasibility of some current NPfIT plans. The continuing uncertainty and delays have the potential to undermine the productivity gains envisaged by the 2002 review."
Comments
There are 2 comments. Join the discussion
1. Roger Huffadine
Choose & Book is never going to provide the returns that it promised.
I tried [quite hard] to communicate that directly to the then Secretary of State for Health when the scheme was being piloted. I was,of course, fobbed off.
The underlying model that was used inappropriate and was mis-applied to produce results on paper that could never be achieved in practice.
The scheme has a limited queue length [maximum wait] of 13 weeks for any resource. The model took no account of simple facts like:-
all of the 'best' resources will always be fully booked and getting into the queue will be almost impossible.
and
when all resources are allocated to the 13 week limit then GPs and Clinics will spend inordinate amounts of time trying to place patients in any available resource queue.
but
it does mean that nobody waits more than 13 weeks to see a consultant because if you don't appear in the queueing statistics then you are not waiting and the government can report that their statistics show nobody waiting more than 13 weeks.
The model was flawed - the pilot did not properly replicate a National system & worryingly was mainly mathematical choosing to ignore human behaviour.
2. Mikal Dunne
The project from where I've been contracted is a total mess. Senior management overriding or not even taking IT dept advice when making purchases or deciding policies. There is no knowledge shared between support teams leading to even longer than necessary delays for those at the coal face.