NHS e-records given six-month deadline

The NHS project to digitise medical records in England has six months to shape up - or else.

The Care Records Service project is four years behind schedule and NHS IT suppliers BT and CSC have been told they must speed up the roll out of key systems by November this year.

Department of Health (DoH) director general for informatics Christine Connelly said in a statement: "We will be working closely with the NHS and our current suppliers to improve the pace of delivery.

"If we don't see significant progress by the end of November 2009, then we will move to a new plan for delivering informatics to healthcare."

Speaking at the British Computer Society HC2009 event in Harrogate today, Connelly said the DoH would focus its efforts on hospitals and increasing the speed at which they are given new patient administration systems (PAS) that will eventually support electronic medical records.

Connelly said each hospital trust would be allowed to adapt the way each PAS worked to suit local needs, using a new DoH toolkit, and then these customised applications and lessons about how to use the PAS would be made available to other hospitals.

These customised PAS are intended to be more useful than the vanilla systems and therefore, it is hoped, quicker to bed in.

Connelly also gave hope to health trusts in South England that have been waiting for new PAS since a DoH deal with supplier Fujitsu fell apart last year.

She said that these trusts would now be able to be able to get central funding to choose new suppliers to provide PAS, from an approved DoH list.

BT also recently took over responsibility for some of the trusts that were being supplied by Fujitsu in southern England.

A spokesman for BT said the company was "confident" it would be able to meet the deadline by building on its work installing PAS at London hospitals.

He said: "We will continue to work with NHS [Connecting for Health] to determine how we can best meet the changing requirements of the NHS. This will include considering how we might offer acute trusts a more flexible and tailored approach.

"In London we have already achieved notable success with our rollout of IT systems to community and mental health trusts, which is now 70 per cent complete.

"We have installed systems that are up and working at four acute trusts in London and have successfully completed a three-month improvement programme with them. We will apply the lessons learnt to our future deployments in London and the South."

Connelly said the 2015 completion date and the £12.7bn cost for the larger National Programme for IT would remain the same.