NHS IT program delayed 2 years, costs spiral to £20 billion or more!

NHS IT program delayed 2 years, costs spiral to £20 billion or more!

	Published : Wed, 31 May 2006 14:55 By : Cedric Benson Print this Story

LONDON - The National Health Service IT programme is at least two and half years beyond schedule and could even cross its budget limits, the government admitted today. Lord Warner, the Health Minister overseeing the project said that the cost was likely to be in the region of £20 billion rather than the £6.2 billion quoted earlier.

He said that the actual cost would nearly double since NHS hospitals would have to buy PCs and train staff to use them. Even existing systems would have to be upgraded, Lord Warner said in an interview with the Financial Times. He said that some parts of the programme were "going pretty well and pretty much on time while other parts were going more slowly than we would otherwise like."

The IT program of the NHS is envisaged as a centralized platform wherein patients can choose appointments from various dates and locations. The system will connect 30,000 GPs to 300 hospitals. A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) due next month is thought to have slammed the scheme for its failure. Lord Warner agreed the scheme had not addressed the concerns of the NHS staff.

"That is probably a fair criticism in part. We possibly could have got into the game earlier, and we could probably have done it better earlier on," he said. "The National Care Record plan involves electronic summary medical records - possibly including major diagnoses, operations, recent test results, current medications and allergies - and more detailed records to which access will be limited to regional medical staff."

Meanwhile the BMA has said that patients need to be consulted before putting their records in the system. "Family doctors have been in the forefront of using modern technology but have been concerned that this national scheme for an electronic database of patient information is trying to do too much too quickly and could threaten patient confidentiality," said Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the British Medical Association’s GPs Committee.

"The BMA’s GPs Committee position is that patients should be given the opportunity to provide an informed consent before their health record details are put on a national database."