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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."
I read the summary and "disastrous NHS National Program for IT" reminds me of UK Taxpayers' Money Getting Wasted On IT Spending.
both sides are to blame here - government agencies are often really bad in project management and contractors are abusing this...
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...
Maybe governments should start writing contracts that only pay up if a usable systems s delivered at the end of it ?
OK know this is a gross oversimplification but at least it would give the people doing the work some decent motivation to make sure it did actually work in the end.
I was brought in as a capacity planner on a former NHS computerization contract about 30 years ago. After 3 months there s was obvious to me that what the were doing, the very silly way they were doing it was not going to ft on the IBM mainframe they had specified to do this.
On pointing this out to them I was told that some very highly paid consultants had said it was going to work and who was I, a lowly contractor, to question their wisdom even though this was the job they brought me in to do.
I was asked to produce some pretty pictures and my contract was not renewed.
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
s/health/defence
The UK is once again in the ludicrous situation it was in of having actual government ministers go on TV and tell the country it's cheaper to go ahead and build pointless aircraft carriers than stop the projects right now. We see once again the level of courage they had with the banks - who just announced *bonuses*, not investments or redundancy payments, freaking *bonuses*, of £14bn - paid for by the real workers. Announced co-incidentally the day the Murdochs were publicly grilled, so it got little coverage. Thank goodness it's not their money.
Once again, this proves anything that needs to get done, gets done, privately (doctors implementing their own electronic database) without the need of government.
Except it doesn't do what needs to be done, only the easy part of what needs to be done. It's fine as long as I only fall ill close to home, but if I need to see a doctor when I'm at the other end of the country, well fine, I can see a doctor, but they won't have access to my medical records.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Actually, the worst part is that healthcare IT has very good specifications already. In fact, all the standards needed to implement a system like this with maybe half a million pounds (initial buildout - scaling would of course cost more) exist. HL7, CDA, and multitudes of other specs already solve all the problems with storing EMRs, and there's several solutions already from some big name vendors already to solve the problem (where I work, we use Agfa).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
I'm sorry, but you particular view of the world breaks when people need to work together that have no reason to work together other than that 'The People' would like them to.
Localized private companies don't want to invest money in being able to exchange data with other localized private companies (possibly in a completely different country), since they don't have any use for such a system.
And if you get hit somewhere where the local company doesn't have coverage, and you unfortunately die because you're hyper allergic to penicilline.. Well. That's not their problem, now is it?
That's what you have government for, to have some sort of control over all the little fiefdoms. Although I agree with you that what government tends to do nowadays is far overreaching.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
The UK government in this situation is (attempting) to fulfill a need of society by commissioning the construction of a piece of 'public infrastructure' that the government deemed the society needed.
Actually, the real problem in the UK is that, because, since WW2, we have alternated between socialist and capitalist governments, we have ended up with an infrastructure that sometimes combines the social conscience of capitalism with the freedom and efficiency of socialism. We have socialist structures that conservative governments hate and want to fail, but can't openly abolish because the voters actually rather like them (and know damned well that even if they were abolished, we'd only see token tax cuts). We get public money used to engage private contractors, and "commercial confidentiality" use by the government to avoid public scrutiny. We get road and rail transport nationalized by a socialist government, then the profitable bit (road) privatized by the next while rail goes to hell, finally we get rail semi-sold off in a bizarre kludge where one company owns the rails and other companies run the trains on ridiculously short franchises that deter any investment. We get nonsensical "internal markets" set up in the NHS whereby public bodies are supposed to compete like private companies...
Probably the best solution to the NHS would have been to set up a quango which employed its own development team to produce its own system based on an open data exchange standard. A socialist solution to a socialist problem: put taxpayers money in, get a bit of public infrastructure out. Instead, we get a half-baked mix of government bureaucracy and private contracts with "for profit" companies.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
As someone who was involved with the project from early on...
The NHS really didn't know what it wanted, it just knew that it kinda wanted some sort of joined up system, and that it had a massive wodge of cash to spend.
Result? Even when the project was years late, the NHS was STILL delivering requirements.
Add to that entrenched company's refusing to be a part of the project and working against it from the outside (One of the biggest GP software suppliers did this), good old fashioned stupidity, and a reporting structure that was classically backwards, everyone could see it would have issues.
The big suppliers are far more astute than government is. They could see several years down the line that the project would get canned, especially if the Tories got in, so they started building to that conclusion to the project (and turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy).
One last kick at everyone involved... the GPs themselves. Under the ideas of "privacy", they fought the system wholesale. Despite the system having adequate safeguards in place. The reality is that the system would make it easier to expose bad practice among HCPs, and harder to bury evidence when needed by FOI requests. You can't sell that system to the people who are using it... it would be like making politicians vote for making themselves more transparent. Never going to happen.
I can make words bold too. Fuck off, troll.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin