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UK Health Service Fears Huge Legal Fight Over Unwanted Contracts
DMandPenfold writes "The Department of Health is concerned that Fujitsu, CSC and BT would team up against it in a multibillion pound legal fight, should it decide to scrap the disastrous NHS National Program for IT. Fujitsu walked away from a £709 million contract in 2008, and remains locked in legal wrangling with the government over claims for the majority of the value. Today, MPs urged the government to seriously consider abandoning the program and therefore to consider terminating the remaining CSC and BT contracts, worth £3 billion and £1 billion respectively."
Summaries actually summarised the article, and not just reposted the first two paragraphs of it...
(The below is my opinion, not a summary of the article)
Basically, what has happened is that the Great And Wonderful NHS Computerised Records System has been in the doldrums for so long that we have ended up with a situation where every GP (community doctor for those not in the UK, they run their own clinics outside of hospitals) and every hospital has implemented their own computer records system, with the large majority of them incompatible with each other.
The only semblance of the NHS wide system to come to light in a customer facing manner has been the emergency care records, which is a computerised subset of your entire record meant to be accessible to every A&E (ER) department in the country - but they still haven't rolled it out to everyone, and it won't be rolled out to everyone it would seem.
It has gotten to the point where the NHS requirements have changed so much that the contracting companies are now walking away from their contracts because they are being asked to do so much more work under the original commitments.
This whole thing has been collossally mismanaged from the start, the current government just gets the blame for the result...