By Nick Heath, 22 July 2008 17:15
NEWS
A health trust serving more than 500,000 people said it has pulled out of the national NHS IT electronic care record programme because it has lost confidence in the project following the departure of key supplier Fujitsu.
The Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Trust (RUH) has stopped the deployment of the Cerner Millennium electronic care records system - part of the £12.7bn national NHS IT modernisation programme.
The Trust said it terminated the implementation because it had lost confidence in the delivery of the system following Fujitsu's exit as the provider delivering the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the south of England.
silicon.com Public Sector
Get the latest public sector news straight to your inbox. Sign up for the PS newsletter today!
Fujitsu will continue to deliver the system in the south until it departs in November and health authorities are now in negotiations with Bath about whether it will use its own provider to implement the Millennium care records system or turn to other NPfIT providers, BT or CSC.
The RUH provides acute treatment and care for a catchment population of around 500,000 people in Bath, and the surrounding towns and villages in north east Somerset and western Wiltshire.
The delivery of the NPfIT has been beset by problems, with a parliamentary committee hearing earlier this year that the Lorenzo care record system was still to go live six years into the programme.
A spokesman for the Southern Programme for IT confirmed that "the deployment of Millennium is now not taking place" in RUH.
He said that if the Bath Trust decided to pick its own supplier from a list of approved providers to deliver the system it would have to be funded locally.
The spokesman added that negotiations were continuing between central health authorities and the trust and that he was confident the work already undertaken by Fujitsu would be able to be built on for any future delivery of a care record system.
No date has been set for resuming the implementation of the system.
A spokeswoman for RUH said: "Following the termination of the contract between the NHS and Fujitsu, and subsequent meetings between the trust, Fujitsu, Cerner and Connecting for Health, the assessment of the RUH trust board was that it did not have sufficient confidence in the level of support that it would receive from the suppliers, at and beyond the go-live period, to proceed with the implementation of Millennium."
Comments
There is 1 comment. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
This has a lot to do with NPfIT not being able to get their requirements straight. Then the Gov sticks their boots in and changes what they want but don't want to amend the contract and pay more for the extra work required.