NHS misses hospital IT roll-out target

Only four acute hospital trusts out of 22 promised by the end of October have gone live with new IT systems under the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), Connecting for Health has said.

In June, Connecting for Health, which is responsible for delivering the £12.4bn NPfIT, told the Parliamentary Committee of Public Accounts that by the end of October programme suppliers CSC, Accenture and Fujitsu would implement 22 patient administration systems in acute trusts.

Last week the agency said that four had been rolled out on time.

"As is inevitable in any large IT-enabled change programme that is deploying into operational NHS sites, delivering treatment and services that are critical to the lives of patients, there will have to be changes to deployment dates for a range of reasons that can either be supplier- or NHS-driven or a combination of both," it said.

Connecting for Health highlighted progress in non-acute trusts. During the period 23 June to 31 October, a total of 56 major local systems were implemented across the NHS - an average of three a week, it said.

During the period 1 November 2006 to 30 April 2007, more than 120 major local systems are forecast to be deployed across England.

Trust feels pain of NHS IT roll-out

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