Tuesday, Oct 28, 2008
NHS records project grinds to halt
FT.com: NHS records project grinds to halt
What on earth does this thing do does anybody know? Isn't it a few computers and a database? Sounds like it should be raising people from the dead at that price.
Posted by whiteknight @ 12:47 AM (586 views) Add Comment
13 Comments
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1. drewster said...
whiteknight,
In essence yes, but that's like describing a bank's IT systems as just a few computers and a database. With the NHS project there are important requirements for reliability, stability, and security - just like a bank. Banks spend lots of money on their IT, in fact they consider it a core part of their business and would never dream of outsourcing it. The NHS's mistake was trying to outsource it. According to Google, there are 1.5million people working for the NHS. £12bn is £8,000 per employee. Shocking really!
2. whiteknight said...
RE: "bank's IT systems as just a few computers and a database." . That's true isn't it?
Another viewpoint would be that Banks spend a lot of money on IT because they have internal IT departments. People want budgets to spend.
Some of it should be outsourced where it makes sense.
3. Doghouse said...
From 21 years NHS experience this isn't a surprise...disgraceful, yes, but not a suprise. NHS management is a joke. No matter how much you try to plan your service, the bosses always wait until the wheels have totally fallen off before they take some half-witted, panic action - you really do not want to know how much essential services run from one crisis to the next, and are held together with sticky tape. It's very worrying and getting worse.
Medical records are really complex things and include scans, charts, photographs, radiographs, hand written notes as clinicians draw diagrams to document conditions and injuries etc. Scanning that lot in manually wouldn't be possible or provide the quality needed, so they have to get the software to talk to all sorts of equipment. So it is a pretty complex task - but i'm sure if they found 100 decent programmers, chucked them all together and told them they'd get £50k each if they came up with the required software in a year, I'm sure the job would have been done by now...and all for £5million.
It's always amazed me how I can put a card in a machine anywhere in the world, and it securely finds my account and deducts the amount withdrawn or charged - yet the NHS can't even get simple databases to work effectively.
4. rich said...
@whiteknight:
Outsourcing sounds like the cheap option, but it isn't always the case. There's a lot of value in having an IT group close to the core of your business.
The trouble with outsourcing (and therefore practically all government IT projects) is that if you're bringing in outside help it means you probably don't have the expertise to design the system yourself, which means the consultants (who don't know your organisation's needs) can set the agenda (i.e. decide how long they want their own contract to drag out) and even in a well-managed project have to spend an eternity trying to document all the requirements.
When you have your own internal IT function they (ideally) know your organisation's needs, and aren't incentivised to create overly-long projects.
That said, even people who should be very familiar with the way IT projects work often don't understand their own requirements... which leads to a massive mess.
5. seanb303 said...
they outsourced it to kbr part of halliburton
6. d'oh said...
I must admit that 12bn sounds like an awful amount of money for the functionality this system will have (at least that I have heard about.) In fact, I cannot even conceive of what would cost that much. In my experience the cost of building IT systems can vary by orders of magnitude. A good team of 3 or 4 people can build something quicker and more functional than a team of 30. In my own company we have had a couple of examples of spending literally millions and a couple of years outsourcing software, which has then had to be scrapped and rewritten by myself (or in extremis, myself and another couple of guys) in half the time. Developer productivity is highly nonuniformly distributed. Those in the top 5% produce much much more usable code than the average.
7. Жоржун said...
Any doubt that the government has no interest in genuinely supporting the economic competence of the UK evaporates on reading this story. If this really is the "world’s biggest civil information technology project", then new ground and new technology would need to be developed by engineers. What an incredible chance for Britain what a developing experience for engineers. But clearly they don't count. Perhaps it is much harder to get splash-backs by sourcing projects within national boundaries.
Amazing to think that £12bn has gone offshore. But not when you look at Labour's strenuous attempt to trash an important sector for the future prosperity of this country. Not long ago a small IT firm was hounded out of business by a 6 year back-dated tax claim. Perhaps this whole fiasco is not evidence of shameless corruption. Bloody looks like it, though.
8. seanb303 said...
http://www.labournet.net/ukunion/0304/kbr2.html
A week after the US and Britain launched war on Iraq, the Dept. of Health awarded a programme management services contract for its £2.3 bn National IT programme to restructure information technology in the NHS.
A three-year contract with Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) will provide full programme management services and may be extended to include procurement at the discretion of the NHS.
KBR is the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton, the Texas-based giant whose former chief executive is now US Vice President and Iraq hawk Dick Cheney. He still receives annual payments from KBR.
9. pendulum said...
Each region in the UK had this system part-hosted, deployed and managed by a different service provider, e.g. BT, Fujitsu, Accenture. However there is a cenrally hosted BT database that they all have to hook into. Not only that, but the work in each service provider was sub-contacted to Indian body shops. Needless to say communication was dire and half the system needed rebooting twice a week as the outsource company couldn't identify basic problems. I got out of this project as it was chaos.
10. Dr Ray said...
Shame it took financial arrmagedon to make them see sense. IT experts and medical staff have been telling them for years it was a disaster and a waste of money but Zanulabour saw it as a way of taking control over medical care and outsourcing it to their friends and financial supporters so went ahead anyway.
Best thing to come out of financial meltdown so far.
11. landofconfusion said...
> Each region in the UK had this system part-hosted, deployed and managed by a different service provider
I'm now beginning to understand why the NHS has more managers than beds...
12. letthemfall said...
Big IT projects are notorious for going wrong somewhere. When many people are involved in trying to put them together it seems failure is almost guaranteed. This isn't the first NHS system to have problems, nor is the NHS unique in having them.
Rich probably sums up the trouble - they don't understand their own requirements.
13. Archiejc said...
I don't want to sound like some of the nutters who post on here regularly, but this IT system has a lot to do with Government's desire to get people back to work and off benefits. Not sure if you're aware, but there's been a huge drive recently on 'health work and wellbeing'. It's basically a political campaign aimed at reducing the burden on the welfare state, but dressed up as Big Government being concerned about YOUR health. The government has been pouring money into schemes (most of them run by healthcare professionals) to reduce sickness absence and get the long-term sick back into work. This IT system could be hugely advantageous. I'm sure applicants for incapacity benefit will be signing 'access all areas' consent for DWP to obtain medical information on them. The kind of access this will give government departments to your medical records will far exceed anything we've ever seen. At present they must request reports from named doctors, who decide which bits of your medical record are relevant (keeping the rest confidential). With the new system, your entire record will be accessed directly (yes, even that visit to the GUM clinic 15 years ago). It would be cynical of me to say that this is all it is about, of course. There will be other huge benefits for... wait for it... anything ending with the word 'agency'. e.g. fitness to drive (DVLA), fitness to work (HSE), fitness to drive a train (DfT), fitness to skipper a ferry (MCA), fitness to practice (NMC, GMC - note the GMC will be able to access the entire medical record of a doctor without even informing them), fitness to enter the country (home office), etc. etc. etc. If you're unlucky enough to work for a government department, then even your boss might be getting the lowdown on your entire medical history. You probably won't remember the bit of paper you signed that provided the consent for them to do this.