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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...
This is a different kind of problem. The government generates huge sets of requirements and then gives a contract to a company with a track record of failing to meet the requirements, then acts surprised when the project fails.
The NHS system is particularly irritating, because their current system is a room full of folders containing paper. It would be trivial to deploy a database system to store the more relevant information (although the storage requirements if you want to store x-rays and CT scans get insane) in a way that's easy for doctors to access. The software is only a couple of months work for a single programmer and could be deployed by the existing IT staff. It would then make life easier for everyone involved.
Instead, the government specifies a system with an insane list of requirements for a huge number of unusual use cases, and then wonders why the project fails.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Whilst you trivialise the problem to a degree (scalability and reliability of an NHS sized system is not trivial) it still shouldn't take a small team more than a few months, and a budget in the hundreds of thousands of pounds, to build such a system. This could then be incrementally evolved over time on a budget in the hundreds of thousands per annum (maybe low millions depending on speed of development). You do then have the data entry problem to consider, but that is surmountable for a fraction of the budget of these big IT solutions.
However that's not how the government thinks. They want to go all encompassing from day one, speccing out a bloated and unworkable unholy mess that the end user doesn't want or need, and certainly doesn't understand, that takes a budget several orders of magnitude more than is required. Then throughout the project more and more people will hear about it and give their input or point of flaws, causing massive amounts of feature creep and confusion, affecting budgets, delivery time lines, and ultimately the quality of the end product.
As a final anecdote, as a small web agency we once were involved in the build of a website for a London borough. We were in competition with some much bigger agencies, but we went back with a good proposal, some great design concepts, and what we felt was a fair budget. The decision maker loved our whole proposal except for the cost - he actually made us double the cost of the build, simply because that then matched his budget so that it wouldn't be cut the next year (spend it or lose it!) and because it brought it in to line with the bigger agencies (so his managers wouldn't think our offering was less feature rich because it was cheaper). This way of thinking is not unique to the the public sector but is endemic throughout it, and the big suppliers prey upon this.
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.
I am a senior doctor in the NHS and am one of many trying to unravel some of this unholy mess to work out which bits are workable.
The obvious stuff - own a basic infrastructure, use open standards, manage contracts tightly and locally, encourage a diverse IT culture within and outside hospitals and use competition to drive down price and drive up performance - this just didn't happen. As the parent says - a centralised system specified by obsessive compulsive people who don't touch patients and with an irresistible urge to gold plate everything.
The NHS doesn't even own the N3 network - it rents it off BT.
We are tied down with a vast number of closed systems that will cause untold unhappiness, waste and frustration in years to come - my hospital is about to go live with CERNER, which has a Windows 3.1/ 'visual basic by a first year programmer' look and feel. It takes >30 seconds to authenticate every time you want to do anything (often)! this alone will steal many hours of medical and nursing time waiting.
They as the parent says, the contracts were poorly specified, carved up by the usual management consultancy clowns and their mates, and then just left to fester.
Unfortunately, the people running the whole thing were not equipped with the mental or managerial experience to make it work. There was one head of IT, Richard Grainger, who might have had a chance at doing it properly from the off, but was brought in too late when the carve up had taken place, and ran away as fast as he could. The rest is history.
What they could have done differently?
1. read ' the mythical man month'
2. pay someone to re-engineer VISTA in c++/ c# / java
3. get some people in who are successful doctors, not just the nearest beardy muppet who doesn't want to touch patients any more.
COI: IAANHSD
Humorous signatures are over-rated.