By Nick Heath, 23 June 2009 14:45
NEWS
What is happening now?
Today the deployment of the CRS is four years behind schedule and is not likely to be implemented across every NHS health trust in England and Wales until 2014 or 2015.
BT and CSC are now left as the only suppliers for the CRS, after both Accenture and Fujitsu have pulled out of delivering the system.
Progress on the CRS has been hindered by technical problems and disagreements over how patients are asked for their consent for their medical records to be digitised.
Six "early adopter" primary care trusts, Bradford and Airedale, Bolton, Bury, Dorset, South Birmingham and South West Essex have been chosen to create summary care records for patients and upload them to The Spine. All six are now uploading records to the system.
Meanwhile, the remaining 374 primary care, hospital and mental health trusts in England are rolling out patient administration systems (PAS), which will initially handle electronic admin records - containing details such as patients' names and addresses - and share them within parts of the local trust. At a later date, the PASes will be upgraded to handle summary care records as well.
Currently, seven years into the National Programme for IT, only 148 PAS have been deployed in 380 health trusts, while delays to the deployments mean the majority of these systems are interim solutions, to be replaced at some point in the future.
To find out what the reviews said about the Choose and Book system, click here to read page three
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Antony Watts
I still fail to see why people could not carry their own records around with them. For example by recording them on their bank smartcard... what do we need a massive central data base and huge communication network for?
2. Radical Meldrew
Andrew has hit on something here. Why not scrap the ID scheme and issue everbody with an individual NHS smart card instead? It would still be a valid form of ID and be a lot more useful.
3. anonymous
Why not junk the entire Care Records System and give the job to Google.
They alreadt have Google Health up and running in the USA.
Go to Google (or Bing even) and search for 'Google Health' to find out what it's about......