Nhs Pulls The Plug On Its £11Bn It System

[interestrateripoff]

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/nhs-pulls-the-plug-on-its-11bn-it-system-2330906.html

A plan to create the world's largest single civilian computer system linking all parts of the National Health Service is to be abandoned by the Government after running up billions of pounds in bills. Ministers are expected to announce next month that they are scrapping a central part of the much-delayed and hugely controversial 10-year National Programme for IT.

Instead, local health trusts and hospitals will be allowed to develop or buy individual computer systems to suit their needs – with a much smaller central server capable of "interrogating" them to provide centralised information on patient care. News of the Government's plans comes as a damning report from a cross-party committee of MPs concludes that the £11.4bn programme had proved "beyond the capacity of the Department of Health to deliver".

The Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said that, while the intention of creating a centralised database of electronic patient records was a "worthwhile aim", a huge amount of money had been wasted.

Can we now look forward to Ed Balls stating how the govt lacks commitment and if only they had agreed to spend more money this would have worked.

Still I'm sure the contractors have done well out of this.

I mean who enters into a contract where payments aren't linked to a produced end result.

Edited August 3, 2011 by interestrateripoff

[moesasji]

Still I'm sure the contractors have done well out of this.

It must be as this project has cost every single inhabitant of the UK £190.

Am I the only one that can't for the live of it see why it should cost so much. After all a company like Google is likely to store and process much more data than would be involved here. Difference might be that Google actually has a clue what they are doing...

[fluffy666]

Can we now look forward to Ed Balls stating how the govt lacks commitment and if only they had agreed to spend more money this would have worked.

Still I'm sure the contractors have done well out of this.

I mean who enters into a contract where payments aren't linked to a produced end result.

Interestingly, my day job involves this kind of vast-database-with-huge-numbers-of-distributed-users kind of thing, and an offhand quote would come in at perhaps 2 orders of magnitude less than the cost given above. Indeed, the big cost of the whole project would not be the system, but the data conversion and load process.

[DabHand]

Anyone remember google offering to do it for basically nothing, via some variant of google docs. i.e. Patient has direct access and owns own records.

[Lazybones]

Anyone remember google offering to do it for basically nothing, via some variant of google docs. i.e. Patient has direct access and owns own records.

Yes, they announced it is closing down last month http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/google-shuts-down-medical-records-and-health-data-platform/ due to lack of critical mass. Should have been a no brainer for the NHS, although doctors might not have liked the fact that the patient owns their individual health record and defines who has access.

[57percent]

Have Accenture ever delivered anything?

This is a serious question.

[Aidan Ap Word]

Interestingly, my day job involves this kind of vast-database-with-huge-numbers-of-distributed-users kind of thing, and an offhand quote would come in at perhaps 2 orders of magnitude less than the cost given above. Indeed, the big cost of the whole project would not be the system, but the data conversion and load process.

Me 2 ... though I would put forward that the requirements capture is/would have been a nightmare. The ministerial enquiry failed to even acknowledge the challenge of this.

So big costs that would not normally be found on a project of this size would have been stuff like:

i) disproportionate deployment effort (including data migration)

ii) requirements capture and sign off (have you ever tried to get 1 NHS Trust to agree to something let alone all of them) (*)

These are massive extra costs that no-one thought about. And then there is the elephant in the room: the idea that the system would centralise the data into 1 (multi-located) data store (an idea they only dropped a few years ago). Dumb idea from the start. What is technically possible with data is not necessarily the best idea for the data.

Aidanapword

(*) the lack of commitment problem is probably more the empire-losing chaos of an NHS Trust manager agreeing to something that removes control of their own empire/data ...

(**) and the majority of the ex-contractor-on-that-project staff that I have interviewed for roles have not been stellar, either.

[Squeeky]

Google never does anything for free - loss leaders may be, but profit is their game, usually by dominating a market. They do very well at keeping their revenue stream hidden from the end user.

Googles quarterly revenue seems to be in the region of 7 - 8 billion on average with a margin of 25-ish percent every quarter.

http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q2_google_earnings.html

[Downside]

I mean who enters into a contract where payments aren't linked to a produced end result.

I never understood that, surely for a project this large you would get a quote for how much it would cost to implement and a time scale then agree to pay half now and half when its done. Maybe have a clause in there about charging extra each time the management decide to change the specifications. That way you would have a definitive cost and would be more inclined to stick to the plan and keep everything in budget.

Or would this be too simple and cost effective therefore completely against everything the NHS budget controllers stand for?

[fluffy666]

I never understood that, surely for a project this large you would get a quote for how much it would cost to implement and a time scale then agree to pay half now and half when its done. Maybe have a clause in there about charging extra each time the management decide to change the specifications. That way you would have a definitive cost and would be more inclined to stick to the plan and keep everything in budget.

Or would this be too simple and cost effective therefore completely against everything the NHS budget controllers stand for?

Depends - on a project of this magnitude it probably isn't possible to specify that much up-front.

To which the obvious solution is to do a smaller project to start with, perhaps just for a subset of patients in a restricted area, and make sure that the next phase doesn't even start before that phase is working as promised. You can even impose a moratorium on spec changes in that case, keeping them in a pile for the next phase.

[efdemin]

Have Accenture ever delivered anything?

This is a serious question.

Bit random though, I'm not sure they are caught up in this mess? Or if they are, they're part of a larger consortium. Why not single out EDS, Capita, Cap Gemini, etc, etc.?

[Bloo Loo]

I blame the borg.

Assimilation is copyright owned by the collective.

Edited August 3, 2011 by Bloo Loo

[fluffy666]

I blame the borg.

Assimilation is copyright owned by the collective.

If the Borg had IT systems from a consortia, you'd be able to combat them by getting them to try and assimilate cardboard cutouts..

[aussieboy]

Some of them have lost money, its what you get when there is layers of bureaucracy trying to decided what they need and what you get from big IT companies trying to develop stuff from scratch.

+1

Many contractors have been trying to wriggle out of their contracts for quite a while.

The scope of the proposed system was huge: the cost was never much of a huge surprise to me although my experience is peripheral.

Anyone here have any direct dealings with the project?

[scrappycocco]

I mean who enters into a contract where payments aren't linked to a produced end result.

A labour government of course.

[Ruffneck]

Google never does anything for free - loss leaders may be, but profit is their game, usually by dominating a market. They do very well at keeping their revenue stream hidden from the end user.

Googles quarterly revenue seems to be in the region of 7 - 8 billion on average with a margin of 25-ish percent every quarter.

http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q2_google_earnings.html

Yeah but however much it would of costed it would have been a MASSIVE saving from this 11 billion waste of cash.What a joke.Scrap the NHS entirely imo , cut taxes accordingly of course , UK CANNOT AFFORD THE NHS END OF.

[Injin]

Soooo..... when is the next one going to be announced?

Team blue needs new income streams.

[sympatex]

I never understood that, surely for a project this large you would get a quote for how much it would cost to implement and a time scale then agree to pay half now and half when its done. Maybe have a clause in there about charging extra each time the management decide to change the specifications. That way you would have a definitive cost and would be more inclined to stick to the plan and keep everything in budget.

Or would this be too simple and cost effective therefore completely against everything the NHS budget controllers stand for?

hehe i like this, however the reality is of government in general is they simply won't deliver the answers to the requirements capture process on time, will be incomplete, or don't understand the question because the system they currently use is what they're happy with.

You won't get half of the money upfront. noone will work to a fixed budget because of the nature of the beast that is central government.

They will make a billion changes from start to finish as more snouts enter the trough to get "their bit done" and it is difficult to obtain ownership for those changes as someone has to pay and none of them will do or even have sign off for any budget, they'll just "throw it in there and see what happens". Each change by the interested parties will conflict with someone elses, guarenteed. They will play ping pong with you until eventually you give up and go "fine, f**k it will just do it or this won't get done". And ultimately it won't get done or is over budget.

[Freeholder]

Have Accenture ever delivered anything?

This is a serious question.

Accenture are what was once the consulting arm of Anderson who were shown to be a bunch of crooks over the ENRON scandal. They were banned from all UK government work under the Conservative governments of Major and Thatcher because they were crooks. They 'cultivated' new labour in opposition and were welcomed to the ranks of preferred contractors by the Blair government. I have never heard of anything they did working.

[getknk]

was accenture doing it for NHS?

I;m hearing accenture projects are all crash landing ..

i know of 3 similar big projects which Accenture dumped at pre=final stages..

this might be the 4th huge one !!

[57percent]

Bit random though, I'm not sure they are caught up in this mess? Or if they are, they're part of a larger consortium. Why not single out EDS, Capita, Cap Gemini, etc, etc.?

Only because I don't have much experience of the others. Accenture/Anderson were notorious for costing a fortune, but never actually delivering anything other than mountains of paperwork written by graduates who couldn't design or code.

When I noticed they were involved with the NHS project, my only thought was that the govt didn't actually want the project to happen.

Edited August 3, 2011 by 57percent

[Bloo Loo]

you know, it cant have been hard for a web page per patient to have been set up.

Doctor logs in with his "super key" and updates the page.

Patient logs in with his personal key and views the page.

Xray tech logs in and notes the location of xray files.

cant be too hard to start at this level.

Its when you want full integration like, letters the receptionist wrote, appointments missed, costs assigned to patient for meds and equipment, 500 boxes to tick fro "management"...thats where is all starts to go pear shaped.

[stormymonday_2011]

Soooo..... when is the next one going to be announced?

Team blue needs new income streams.

The coalition has been busy commissioning its own IT disasters as fast as it has been shutting down the last governments.

Both the Real Time Information PAYE system at HMRC and the Universal Benefit system at the DWP promise to be real doozies. The former has particularly ambitious objectives and tight deadlines. HMRC will be requiring employers to make online returns of employees pay,tax and NIC once a month rather than once a year as at present. Given that there are nearly 5 million employers in the UK and over 22 million employees that is going to be a nightmare to implement. HMRC struggle to get and process these records anually. Doing it once a month is going to be well nigh impossible. In addition with the total number of employee returns a year ballooning to 300 million per annum under the new application the scope for administrative f*ck ups will increase exponentially. I predict MPs will have no idea what hit them when the personal complaint cases start to bury them.

Edited August 3, 2011 by stormymonday_2011

[Bloo Loo]

The coalition has been busy commissioning its own IT disasters as fast as it has been shutting down the last governments.

Both the Real Time Information PAYE system at HMRC and the Universal Benefit system at the DWP promise to be real doozies. The former has particularly ambitious objectives and tight deadlines. HMRC will be requiring employers to make online returns of employees pay,tax and NIC once a month rather than once a year as at present. Given that there are nearly 5 million employers in the UK and over 22 million employees that is going to be a nightmare to implement. HMRC struggle to get and process these records anually. Doing it once a month is going to be welp nigh impossible. In addition with the total number of employee returns a year ballooning to 300 million per annum under the new application the scope for administrative f*ck ups will increase exponentially. I predict MPs will have no idea what hit them when the personal complaint cases start to bury them.

and they wanted thousands upon thousands of ID card scanners to sift through 65 million records and come up with A: verify the card was ligit and B: the carrier was who the card says he was...instantly.

Numpties...Dangerous numpties.

[erranta]

<br />Accenture are what was once the consulting arm of Anderson who were shown to be a bunch of crooks over the ENRON scandal. They were banned from all UK government work under the Conservative governments of Major and Thatcher because they were crooks. They 'cultivated' new labour in opposition and were welcomed to the ranks of preferred contractors by the Blair government.  I have never heard of anything they did working.<br />

11 Billion is peanuts compared to the TRILLIONS ££ taken over decades from so-called "Cancer charity"

What is all the money spent on by unaccountable companies and people and what areas of research are done? Ever seen a published document or accounts attributable to these donations that prey on peoples fear?