Recent Blog Posts

Many thanks to Chris Potts for this wonderfully timely and ironic spot from the annals of Department of Health history. Click here to read a document published in 1998 by the Labour government, ...

Government CIO John Suffolk and his colleagues are preparing plans for the publication of IT-related documents that have always been secret and difficult to obtain even under the Freedom of ...

iSoft, an important supplier to the NHS IT scheme, issued a market update today, which appears to have been well received by the market as the company's share price rose by about 16% to 28.5 cents. ...

"Since IBM took over the 'auto-pay' system my life has been a misery" - Bryan Thompson, Operations Director at car rental company Miles & Miles.There are plans to extend the problematic ...

Pulse magazine says the BMA is confident it can convince the new government to order a new opt-in model for summary care records. Opt-in is likely to mean that patients would give their consent to ...

A new Liberal Democrat MP has put down an early-day motion that "calls on the Government to halt all SCR [summary care records] updates, effective immediately, pending its promised comprehensive ...

The Treasury outlines in a statement today (24 May 2010) how the government will save £6bn in 2010/11. There's no detail, only headline figures. This is what the statement says: "Government ...

As expected, the new government has scrapped the controversial and unwieldy identity cards project created as a flagship of Labour policy. Labour's problem was that it never properly explained why ...

Board directors of major Government IT suppliers have good reason to vote Tory Plans for major outsourcing deals already underway in private? Sir Peter Gershon, adviser to the Conservative Party, ...

Smarthealthcare.com reports that the Department of Health is allowing some trusts in the north of England to use an alternative to the Lorenzo software they were going to install from their NPfIT ...

On the "Make IT Better" website, which is run by the Conservative Party, is a promise to publish gateway reviews "when they are produced, and allow the public to scrutinise the value and progress ...

Ruth Carnall, the Chief Executive of NHS London, has told all London NHS Chief Executives that a cut of more than £100m in funding for BT's NPfIT contract means that "it will no longer be possible ...

John Cruickshank, a specialist with a long track record working in health IT, writes for 2020health, which describes itself as a centre-right web-based think-tank for health and ...

Bristol City Council is making available Google Analytics statistics on the use of its website. This is the sort of openness which makes Bristol a local authority exemplar: On the Google Analytics ...

MP Richard Bacon, a member of the Public Accounts Committee, who has followed the NPfIT more closely than any other MP, yesterday sent a list of questions to Christine Connelly, the Department of ...

Health Care Renewal predicts that the National Program for Healthcare IT in the US is likely, in 2015, to resemble the National Programme for IT in the NHS in 2010.

The Department of Health has responded to as long article in The Guardian saying that the NPfIT is close to imploding. A spokesperson said:"We are continuing to work with the NHS at local level to ...

Richard Veryard has written a response to our report on inaccuracies and ommisions in the Summary Care Records database. He writes:"What's wrong with the single version of truth." Researchers at ...

The National Policing Improvement Agency today publishes a code which governs the use of a new intelligence system that, in effect, implements some of the main recommendations of the Bichard ...

The Irish Independent says that catering staff were able to access confidential patient information held on a £54m health service record system which is being rolled out across Ireland.The ...

In response to the article on this blog by Rob Bowley, on whether Agile can help solve Government IT problems, Matt writes:"Not if what I've seen of 'agile' approaches in government IT is anything ...

Today the Conservatives are launching their 'Tech Manifesto'. It contains a bold new commitment: a 'Right to Government Data', says Stephen Shakespeare who is chairman of the Network for the ...

Computer Weekly published today a call by the British Medical Association to halt what it calls a rushed roll-out of an imperfect Care Records Service. Responding to the article, Rob Bowley has ...

Would Summary Care Records have saved the life of Penny Campbell?[Comments 5 and 6 after this article correct some of the impressions I have given. The SCR is equipped to take GP notes] It's rare ...

David Chassels is a former Director of 3i Corporate Finance in Scotland, and a former partner at BDO. He's now CEO of software house Procession, based at Chesham, Buckinghamshire. He writes to me ...

The Information Commissioner's Office is asking businesses and organisations to put a financial value on protecting personal information.Yesterday the ICO, at the Data Protection Officer Conference ...

Andrea Di Maio, vice president at Gartner, says that by 2012 "one in five government processes will rely on "crowdsourced" data". He says CIOs will need to handle a shift from providing ...

Tom Brooks, who spoke about NHS IT on last night's BBC R4 File on 4 broadcast, has let me have his suggestions on what the next government should do about the NPfIT. Brooks, a much-respected figure ...

Several years ago, I sat next to then-Oracle UK managing director Ian Smith at an industry event. At the time, the software giant was pursuing an aggressive and increasingly contentious purchase of ...

Faulty safety-critical "Fadec" software that was installed on the Chinook Mk2 helicopter had secret modifications after the notorious fatal crash on the Mull of Kintyre, Computer Weekly has ...

The House of Commons held a short debate yesterday on the notorious, fatal crash of Chinook ZD576 on the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994. During the debate, the Shadow Defence Minister, Gerald ...

The lead news item on BBC radio and TV news for much of yesterday referred to computer-related evidence about the Chinook Mk2, of the type that crashed on the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994. The ...

Below are excerpts from the iSoft's annual report, which is published today [1 September 2009] in Australia. IBA Health in Australia acquired iSoft and has now adopted its name. The annual report ...

The Tories are due today to publish the results of a review of the NPfIT, led by Dr Glyn Hayes, former chairman of the British Computer Society's Health Informatics Forum. Dr Hayes, chairman of the ...

In a Cerner conference call after an announcement of the company's s second-quarter results, there was much discussion about "meaningful use" - a phrase which can unlock money from Congress for ...

The culture of smear goes much deeper than the Damian McBride affair. Critics of the National Programme for IT [NPfIT] in the NHS have been the subject of smears in debates in the House of Commons ...

This photo of Chinook ZD576 is the copyright of Robin Crorie who has given kind permission for it to be used by Computer Weekly in connection with the Campaign for Justice to clear the names of the ...

Comment: My highly subjective overview of some of the good and bad at HC2008, the annual Healthcare Computing conference in Harrogate.. The bad: Some of the speeches were, as in previous years, ...

Following my interview with Microsoft COO Kevin Turner about how IT staff can reach the top and earn more, we've had a couple of e-mails on how to get headhunted. If there is a single watchword for ...

News analysis It went largely unnoticed but the minister for the NHS’s National Programme for IT, Ben Bradshaw, has confirmed that data on a central database of millions of confidential health ...

Cabinet ministers come and go, as do prime ministers, and heads of departments. So who will actually be responsible for ID cards or the NHS's National Programme for IT? Nobody. Thank you to Brian ...

In this blog entry the two leaders of the £5bn Defence Information Infrastructure contract [DII], who represent the Ministry of Defence and the Atlas consortium of suppliers, led by services ...

This is a letter signed by 79 doctors, nurses and secretaries at Milton Keynes General Hospital regarding the implementation of a Care Records Service under the NHS's National Programme for IT ...