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Abandoned UK National Health Service IT System Has Cost $16bn... So Far
dryriver writes with news of yet another major software project gone awry. From the article: "An abandoned National Health Service (NHS) patient record system has so far cost the taxpayer nearly £10bn, with the final bill for what would have been the world's largest civilian computer system likely to be several hundreds of millions of pounds higher, according a highly critical report from parliament's public spending watchdog. MPs on the public accounts committee said final costs are expected to increase beyond the existing £9.8bn because new regional IT systems for the NHS, introduced to replace the National Programme for IT, are also being poorly managed and are riven with their own contractual wrangles. When the original plan was abandoned the total bill was expected to be £6.4bn."
There's a lot to this kind of thing. I worked in a help desk once where a system was promised to be rolled out by X date. The contractor brought on all the staff based on that promised, kitted out the building with all the required hardware to provide the support and... nothing. The guys couldn't be fired, and there was no other contracts to move them on to, so they sat around waiting for the software to finally be rolled out.
In other words, it's not just the software that cost all the money, all the fuck-ups along the way compounded and inflated the price tag way beyond what it should have been.
Clinical records are the last big domain that resists computerisation.
Why? Because it's really hard to get right. You have a massive quagmire of competing interests, egos, a very complicated domain model and legal/regulatory environment that changes constantly and is different in every country. And to top this off, you have privacy whingers.
Common sense suggests that if it was an easy problem, they've have cracked it by now. As it is, I walk into my local GP for a checkup, and behind the reception, there's a massive wall of paper patient records. In 2013.
You have government of course (let's face it, governments have few very good people, and hire literally millions of bozos), but I'm not sure if it's any worse than the privatized, Balkanized carpetbagger-fest that passes as a health system in the US...
Absolutely not excusing the disgraceful and self-serving behaviour of the big integrators here (CSC and BT, amongst others), but they've blown billions for a reason.