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UK's NHS Will Drop Delayed E-Records Project
Centralized, electronic medical records are touted as a means of increasing efficiency and patient safety. The "centralizing" and "turning electronic" phases, though, have some very rough edges. An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the Guardian about one such digitization project in the UK: "An ambitious multibillion pound programme to create a computerised patient record system across the entire NHS is being scrapped, ministers have decided. The £12.7bn National Programme for IT is being ended after years of delays, technical difficulties, contractual disputes and rising costs."
It is still unclear how much money the government has agreed to pay contractors in recent negotiations over cancellation fees for scrapping the project.
Transcript of those talks:
David Cameron: We would like our money back please.
Contractors: No.
David Cameron: Jolly good. Well, carry on then.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
First comment on the original article regarding getting their money back....
Oh, and here's a nice bit of dodginess:
"The costs of the venture should have been lessened by the contracts signed by the IT providers making them liable for huge sums of money if they withdrew from the project; however, when Accenture withdrew in September 2006, then Director-General for NPfIT Richard Granger charged them not £1bn, as the contract permitted, but just £63m. Granger's first job was with Andersen Consulting, which later became Accenture."
The UK does some odd things sometimes. I work for a software company and about 15 years ago an agency in the UK Gov was interested in our software. They wanted 50 seats. Well our normal price is about $4000 but for that big of a sale we would have gone as low as $2000. Well they decided to write their own custom solution three years a two million pounds later they still didn't have a working system and asked us to consult for them and tell them what they did wrong. The offer was more than buying our system! We told them that that but they said that they want to waste all that development money.
Then you have the UKs bizarre love affair with the Nimrod sub hunting plane. I wonder if they are trying to convince everyone and themselves that the Comet really wasn't a failure. The UK could have bought the Grumman E-2 or even the Boeing E-3 AWACS but instead decided to try and convert the Nimrod into an AWACS. Well okay then the UK could have bought the Radar system from the E-2 and fitted it to the Nimrod. Well they decided to develop a new and better radar, Except after years of testing and Billions of dollars it was a failure. The RAF ended up using slightly post World War II Shackletons with World War II era US radar for AEW until 1991 when they bought 7 E-3s.
In 1996 the Nimrod sub hunter was getting really tired. Now RAF could have picked up updated P-3s from the US. Now the Orion is based on a 1950s airliner but then again the Nimrod is based on a 1940s airliner. Or they could have waited for the P-3s replacement which ended up being the P8. Instead they decided to update the Nimrod with new engines, wing and avionics. Well after around 4 billion pounds they killed that program in 2011. Oh and India just bought P-8s for one fourth the cost per plane than what the Nimrod MRA4 would have cost if they had delivered it.
Now we have this. I have to wonder if VistA would have worked for them. It is used by the US VA and is FOSS.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Your example could hardly better contradict your point:
Universal healthcare in the UK (the NHS) was implemented nationwide in about 3 years, covering 50million people with comprehensive and free healthcare (give or take a modest prescription fee at the time). It replaced a complex network of private, state (county) and charity organizations, and came up against bitter opposition from the vested interests in private healthcare at the time. It has its limitation, but public support for it is consistently very strong.
I appreciate your point on IT systems is probably true, and this project is clearly a disaster - but expanding it to general provision of healthcare ignores every functional single-payer system in the world.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
From the Wikipedia article:
"Granger's credentials were questioned by his own mother, a campaigner for the preservation of local health services in her area, who expressed her amazement at his appointment, criticising the whole scheme as 'a gross waste of money'".
If there wasn't so much evidence, Wikipedia's editors would likely delete that article for being so implausible. If I weren't a UK tax-payer, it'd almost be funny...
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)