PRIVATE EYE 1226 26.12.08 - 8.1.09
AWAY IN A GRANGER
Six years after it was conceived by a bunch of IT consultants and
blessed by a grinning Tony Blair, the disastrous £13 billion National
Health Service IT scheme has at last been officially recognised as
deeply in the doo-doo.
The well-documented delays, generously estimated at four years, and
chaos (EYEs passim ad nauseam) stem from the ‘big-is-beautiful’
approach adopted by the man who set up the programme, Richard
Granger. Rather than set standards to which hospitals with hugely
varying requirements should develop their own systems, he handed out
regional monopoly contracts to four big IT consultancies, who
themselves turned to large but completely unprepared software companies.
Now even NHS chief executive, David Nicholson, can see the writing on
the wall. This month he conceded to a committee of MPs that the main
software, provided by US firm Cerner, was “based on billing, it’s
been developed in America, and does not take into account a whole
series of issues around 18-weeks and patient tracking that we need,
as a result we’re having to change all that.” [sic! If the
briefing was as bad as that no wonder there’s chaos! -cs]
Sound familiar ? Nicholson could almost have been reading from the
Eye’s special report on the project , System Failure (Eye 1179) ,
back in March 2007, which explained that the software “was proving
unfit for purpose because it had been, er, written for US healthcare
systems. These were built around billing for care and were unable to
produce the data on which NHS management depends.”
The other software firm, iSoft, has an even worse record. The new
‘Lorenzo’ system it promised for March 2004 us, claimed Nicholson
nearly five years on,, “being very tentatively tested.” Way to go!
Yet in the couple of years since the Eye pointed out the Cerner
problem, instead of ditching the project, Nicholson has been
“resetting” the contracts relying on its pisspoor product, with
hundreds of millions more on offer to an IT industry that now very
profitably employs many of the men that handed them the cash (see.
for example, last Eye).
That was before Alistair Darling insisted on more efficiency savings
to help fund his fiscal stimulus, however. Now even the NHS boss
admits “We’ve got to think how we take it forward . We can’t go on
and on like this”. Looks like it might have taken a global economic
meltdown to force a re-think.
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