| MP Criticises 'Directionless' IT Policy |
| Friday, 22 February 2008 | |
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Liberal Democrat MP for Southport John Pugh spoke in Parliament this week about the governments much-maligned attempts to implement an electronic system of patient records in the NHS. Describing current government policy this morning as "almost hopelessly lost", Dr Pugh used a debate on the Health Select Committees latest report to raise several issues currently plaguing the troubled "Lorenzo" IT project.
"The government simply doesn't know - or at least isn't telling anyone - precisely what it hopes to achieve" commented the MP. "The latest report states simply that there is a perplexing lack of clarity on what 'Connecting for Health' will now deliver. The benefits just aren't quantified." "Take the issue of secondary care records for example. We don't know what exactly will be on them, we don't know exactly how they will be used, and we don't know which situations they will be needed in - as the report puts it, 'it is not clear what information will be recorded and shared on "My question is this: how can the Government have a serious cost-benefit analysis if they do not know what they are endeavouring to do in the first place?" Dr Pugh has been critical of the ill-fated NHS IT scheme in the past, and is clear on where he believes the problems lie. "Commissioning the entire system en bloc just doesn't make sense. The argument has been that central procurement is cheaper, and technically necessary - when in reality it is neither. Similar arguments about it being the only way to secure interoperability don't stand up either; all that is required is wide agreement on IT standards and the ways in which data are going to be formulated, expressed and transmitted." "When the system is, as I have described, chronically under-specified, and when the scale of implementation being demanded restricts you to a handful of suppliers (who you then become dependant upon as a result), then you are simply asking for trouble. "Only CSC, BT, and Fujitsu are now really left in the 'big game'. The problems iSoft have experienced and their subsequent takeover perhaps illustrate why. If the government had more faith in smaller scale IT suppliers working with PCT Trusts on a local level, as well as a clearer vision as to what it is requesting from them in the first place, then we could have avoided the situation where hospitals up and down the country are forced into waiting for the perfect electronic system to come wandering over the horizon. "The merits, and the necessity, of digitising data, tele-medicine, image transition and electronic prescribing are well established. It is testament to the governments fundamental mishandling of the NHS IT debacle however that the benefits of such schemes are being overshadowed by the incompetence of their implementation." |