The £2.3bn national programme to modernise health
service IT systems is "risky and ambitious" but it has sufficient
safeguards in place to help ensure does not repeat the mistakes of
previous national IT projects, according to the chief executive of
the Office of Government Commerce.
Peter Gershon made the assurance when quizzed by MPs on the
House of Commons Public Accounts Committee late last month.
"If projects fail in the future they will do so for novel
reasons and not the old familiar reasons," he said.
The committee members suggested to Gershon that the NHS IT
programme risked failing to achieve its aims because it had ignored
advice from the National Audit Office, the government's spending
watchdog, and others on how to manage large IT projects.
"There are shelfloads of advice that very big projects should be
cut into much smaller bite-sized chunks," said committee member
Richard Bacon.
Gershon said that the NHS IT programme was broken down into
smaller projects, adding that the electronic patient record system
would not introduced in a "big bang" implementation.
He admitted that the NHS IT programme was "risky and ambitious"
but added that procedures such as the government’s gateway review
process - designed to eliminate project failures - would help keep
it on track.