TheNational Programme for Information
Technology, the NHS's flagship project to
produce anational
networked information infrastructure for patient
care, could become the government's biggest IT
disaster yet, experts have said.
Their comments came after
Fujitsu walked away from negotiations on a "more flexible"
contract to supply an
electronic patient record system to hospitals in the south and
west of England.
Martyn Thomas, who represents the UK Computing Research
Committee (UK CRC), a policy committee for computing research in
the UK that consists of computer science professors at 23 leading
universities and an expert witness in IT-disaster court cases,
described the national programme as "a train wreck in slow
motion".
Speaking in response to the news, Thomas said UK CRC had
warned the parliamentary select committee on health several
years ago that the NPfIT "was exhibiting signs of failure" and
called for an independent review to identify ongoing risks and ways
to manage them.
Thomas said Richard Granger, then head of the NPfIT, and his
successor, David Nicholson, had accepted the comments, but had been
overruled by ministers.
MP Richard Bacon, who sits on parliament's
Public Accounts Committee, said Fujitsu's refusal to sign a
renegotiated contract was an opportunity to give back to local
trusts the right to buy what they liked.
"The original approach of handing over monopolies to a handful
of local service providers was never going to work and has been
shown not to work," he said.
Bacon warned against handing Fujitsu's contract over to the
other two main suppliers on the project, CSC and BT. It was a way
to screw things up completely, he said. "This whole thing was built
on the detailed patient record system. We have not seen much yet,
but we are already four years late and £4bn in."
Bacon and Thomas both noted that the successes claimed for the
programme, such as the ability to send digital X-rays over IT
networks, were not part of the original NPfIT, and in fact preceded
it. Thomas said the X-ray system was part of the argument for the
programme made to the then prime minister, Tony Blair.
The British
Medical Association has supported the aims of the national
programme because it says it could improve patient safety. Chaand
Nagpaul, IT lead on the BMA's GP committee, said, "The BMA is
concerned that the termination of contract between Fujitsu and
Connecting for Health will cause further delays to the NHS IT
programme. We hope that the situation can be resolved without
further delays or cost to the taxpayer."
The National Outsourcing
Association (NOA) said, "The Fujitsu retraction follows on from
Accenture bowing out last year. This leaves the success of the NHS
project on a knife edge, with literally billions of pounds worth of
taxpayers' money being wasted already with more likely to follow it
down the drain."
Read Tony Collins' blog on Fujitsu's withdrawal from Connecting for
Health.