Category Archives: HSCIC

NHS “Wachter” digital review is delayed – but does it matter?

Posted on 13/07/2016 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

The Wachter review of NHS technology was due to be published in June but has been delayed. Would it matter if it were delayed indefinitely?

A “Yes Minister” programme about a new hospital in North London said it all, perhaps. An enthusiastic NHS official shows the minister round a hospital staffed with 500 administrators. It has the latest technology on the wards.

“It’s one of the best run hospitals in the country,” the NHS official tells the minister, adding that it’s up for the Florence Nightingale award for the standards of hygiene.

“But it has no patients,” says the minister.

Another health official tells the minister,

“First of all, you have to sort out the smooth running of the hospital. Having patients around would be no help at all.” They would just be in the way, adds Sir Humphrey.

In the Wachter’s review’s terms of reference (“Making IT work: harnessing the power of health IT to improve care in England“)  there is a final bullet point that refers, obliquely, to a need to consider patients. Could the Wachter terms of reference have been written by a satirist who wanted to show how it was possible to have a review of NHS IT for the benefit of suppliers, clinical administrators and officialdom but not patients?

The Wachter team will, according to the government,

• Review and articulate the factors impacting the successful adoption of health information systems in secondary and tertiary care in England, drawing relevant comparisons with the US experience;

• Provide a set of recommendations drawing on the key challenges, priorities and opportunities for the health and social care system in England. These recommendations will cover both the high levels features of implementations and the best ways in which to engage clinicians in the adoption and use of such systems.

In making recommendations, the board will consider the following points:

• The experiences of clinicians and Trust leadership teams in the planning, implementation and adoption of digital systems and standards;

• The current capacity and capability of Trusts in understanding and commissioning of health IT systems and workflow/process changes.

• The current experiences of a number of Trusts using different systems and at different points in the adoption lifecycle;

• The impact and potential of digital systems on clinical workflows and on the relationship between patients and their clinicians and carers.

Yes, there’s the mention of “patients” in the final bullet point.

Existing systems?

nhsSome major IT companies have, for decades, lobbied – often successfully – for much more public investment in NHS technology. Arguably that is not the priority, which is to get existing systems to talk to each other – which would be for the direct benefit of patients whose records do not follow them wherever they are looked at or treated within the NHS.

Unless care and treatment is at a single hospital, the chances of medical records following a patient around different sites, even within the same locality, are slim.

Should a joining up of existing systems be the main single objective for NHS IT? One hospital consultant told me several years ago – and his comment is as relevant today –

“My daughter was under treatment from several consultants and I could never get a joined-up picture. I had to maintain a paper record myself just to get a joined-up picture of what was going on with her treatment.”

Typically one patient will have multiple sets of paper records. Within one hospital, different specialities will keep their own notes. Fall over and break your leg and you have a set of orthopaedic notes; have a baby and you will have a totally different set of notes. Those two sets are rarely joined up.

One clinician told me, “I have never heard a coroner say that a patient died because too much information was shared.”

And a technology specialist who has multiple health problems told me,

“I have different doctors in different places not knowing what each other is doing to me.”

As part of wider research into medical records, I asked a hospital consultant in a large city with three major hospitals whether records were shared at least locally.

“You must be joking. We have three acute hospitals. Three community intermediate teams are in the community. Their records are not joined. There is one private hospital provider. If you get admitted to [one] hospital and then get admitted to [another] the next week your electronic records cannot be seen by the first hospital.  Then if you get admitted to the third hospital the week after, again not under any circumstances will your record be able to be viewed.”

Blood tests have to be repeated, as are x-rays; but despite these sorts of stories of a disjointed NHS, senior health officials, in the countless NHS IT reviews there have been over 30 years, will, it seems, still put the simplest ideas last.

It would not cost much – some estimate less than £100m – to provide secure access to existing medical records from wherever they need to be accessed.

No need for a massive investment in new technology. No need for a central patient database, or a central health record. Information can stay at its present location.  Just bring local information together on local servers and provide secure access.

A locum GP said on the Pulse website recently,

“If you are a member of the Armed Forces, your MO can get access to your (EMIS-based) medical record from anywhere in the world. There is no technical reason why the NHS cannot do this. If need be, the patient could be given a password to permit a GP to see another Surgery’s record.”

New appointments

To avoid having patients clog up super-efficient hospitals, Sir Humphrey would have the Wachter review respond to concerns about a lack of joined up care in the NHS by announcing a set of committees and suggesting the Department of Health and NHS England appoint a new set of senior technologists.

Which is just what has happened.

Last week NHS England announced  “key appointments to help transform how the NHS uses technology and information”. [One of the NHS appointments is that of a Director of Digital Experience, which is not a fictional title, incidentally. Ironically it seems to be the most patient-facing of the new jobs.]

Said the announcement,

“The creation of these roles reflects recommendations in the forthcoming review on the future of NHS information systems by Dr Bob Wachter.

“Rather than appoint a single chief information and technology officer, consistent with the Wachter review the NHS is appointing a senior medical leader as NHS Chief Clinical Information Officer supported by an experienced health IT professional as NHS Chief Information Officer.

“The first NHS Chief Clinical Information Officer will be Professor Keith McNeil, a former transplant specialist who has also held many senior roles in healthcare management around the world, including Chief Executive Officer at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Chief Executive Officer at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital in Australia.

“The new NHS Chief Information Officer will be Will Smart, currently Chief Information Officer at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. Mr Smart has had an extensive career in IT across the NHS and in the private sector.

“The NHS CCIO and NHS CIO post-holders will act on behalf of the whole NHS to provide strategic leadership, also chairing the National Information Board, and acting as commissioning ‘client’ for the relevant programmes being delivered by NHS Digital (previously known as the Health and Social Care Information Centre).

“The roles will be based at NHS England and will report to Matthew Swindells, National Director: Operations and Information, but the post-holders will also be accountable to NHS Improvement, with responsibility for its technology work with NHS providers.

“In addition, Juliet Bauer has been appointed as Director of Digital Experience at NHS England. She will oversee the transformation of the NHS Choices website and the development and adoption of digital technology for patient ‘supported self-management’, including for people living with long term conditions such as diabetes or asthma. Ms Bauer has led delivery of similar technology programmes in many sectors, including leading the move to take Times Newspapers online…”

Surely a first step, instead of arranging new appointments and committees, and finding ways of spending money on new technology, would be to put in place data sharing agreements between hospitals?

A former trust chief executive told me,

“In primary care, GPs will say the record is theirs. Hospital teams will say it is our information and patient representative groups will say it is about patients and it is their nformation. In maternity services there are patient-held records because it is deemed good practice that mums-to-be should be fully knowledgeable and fully participating in what is happening to them.

“Then you get into complications of Data Protection Act. Some people get very sensitive about sharing information across boundaries: social workers and local authority workers. If you are into long-term continuous care you need primary care, hospital care and social care. Without those being connected you may do half a job or even less than that potentially. There are risks you run if you don’t know the full information.”

He added that the Summary Care Record – a central database of every patient’s allergies, medication and any adverse reactions to drugs, was a “waste of time”.

“You need someone selecting information to go into it [the Summary Care Record]so it is liable to omissions and errors. You need an electronic patient record that has everything available but is searchable. You get quickly to what you want to know. That is important for that particular clinical decision.”

Is it the job of civil servants to make the simple sound complicated?

Years ago, a health minister invited me for an informal meeting at the House of Commons to show me, in confidence, a one-page civil service briefing paper on why it was not possible to use the internet for making patient information accessible anywhere.

The minister was incredulous and wanted my view. The civil service paper said that nobody owned the internet so it couldn’t be used for the transfer of patient records.  If something went wrong, nobody could be blamed.

That banks around the world use the internet to provide secure access to individual bank accounts was not mentioned in the paper, nor the existence of the CHAPS network which, by July 2011, had processed one quadrillion (£1,000,000,000,000,000) pounds.

Did the briefing paper show that the civil service was frightened by the apparent simplicity of sharing patient information on a secure internet connection? If nothing else, the paper showed how health service officials will tend, instinctively, to shun the cheapest solutions. Which may help to explain how the (failed) £10n National Programe for IT came into being in 2002.

Jargon

Radiation_warning_symbolNobody will be surprised if the Wachter review team’s report is laden with  jargon about “delays between technology being introduced and a corresponding rise in output”. It may talk of how new technology could reduce the length of stay by 0.1528 of a bed day per patient, saving a typical hospital £1.8m annually or 7,648 bed days.

It may refer to visions, envisioning fundamental change, establishing best practice as the norm, and a need for adaptive change.

Would it not be better if the review team spoke plainly of the need for a patient with a fractured leg not having to carry a CD of his x-ray images to different NHS sites in a carrier bag?

Some may await the Wachter report with a weary apprehension that its delay – even indefinitely – will make not a jot of difference. Perhaps Professor Wachter will surprise them. We live in hope.

Wachter review terms of reference.

Review of IT in the NHS

Another NPfIT IT scandal in the making?

Hunt announces Wachter review

What can we learn from the US “hospitalist” model?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, CIO, consultants, data sharing, Department of Health, e-health, ERP, health, HSCIC, LPfIT, MoD, National Audit Office, NHS, npfit, open standards, SPfIT, Summary Care Record

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Another NPfIT IT scandal in the making?

Posted on 09/02/2016 | 8 comments

By Tony Collins

Jeremy Hunt may have forgotten what he told the FT 2013, as reported in the paper on 2 June 2o13.

Referring to the failed National Programme for IT [NPfIT] in the NHS he said at that time,

“It was a huge disaster . . . It was a project that was so huge in its conception but it got more and more specified and over-specified and in the end became impossible to deliver, but we musn’t let that blind us to the opportunities of technology and I think one of my jobs as health secretary is to say, look, we must learn from that and move on but we must not be scared of technology as a result.”

He added, “I’m not signing any big contracts from behind [my] desk; I am encouraging hospitals and clinical commissioning groups and GP practices to make their own investments in technology at the grassroots level.”

Now the Department of Health (and perhaps some large IT suppliers) have encouraged Hunt to find £4bn for spending on technology that is (again) of questionable immediate need.

Says Computing, “A significant part of the paperless NHS plans will involve enabling patients to book services and order prescriptions online, as well as giving them the choice of speaking to their doctor online or via a video link.”

The £4bn, if that’s what it will cost, is much less than the cost of the NPfIT. But are millions to be wasted again?

[NPfIT was originally due to cost £2.3bn over three years from 2003 but is expected to cost £9.8bn over 21 years, to 2024.]

Yesterday (8 February 2016) the Department of Health announced a “review of information technology in the NHS”. Announcing it Hunt said.

“Improving the standard of care patients receive even further means embracing technology and moving towards a fully digital and paperless NHS.

NHS staff do incredible work every day and we must give them and patients the most up-to-date technology – this review will tell us where we need to go further.”

The NPfIT was supposed to give the NHS up-to-date technology – but is that what’s needed?

A more immediate need is for any new millions of central funding (for the cost would be in the tens of millions, not billions) to be spent on the seemingly mundane objective of getting existing systems to talk to each other, so that patients can be treated in different parts of the NHS and have their electronic records go with them.

This doesn’t need a new national programme for IT. Some technologists working in the NHS say it would cost no more than £150m, a small sum by NHS IT standards, to allow patient data to reside where it is but be accessed by secure links anywhere, much as secure links work on the web.

But the review’s terms of reference make only a passing reference to the need for interoperability.

Instead the review will have terms of reference that are arguably vague – just as the objectives for the NPfIT were.

The Department of Health has asked the review board, when making recommendations, to consider the following points:

  • The experiences of clinicians and Trust leadership teams in the planning, implementation and adoption of digital systems and standards;
  • The current capacity and capability of Trusts in understanding and commissioning of health IT systems and workflow/process changes.
  • The current experiences of a number of Trusts using different systems and at different points in the adoption lifecycle;
  • The impact and potential of digital systems on clinical workflows and on the relationship between patients and their clinicians and carers.

The head of the review board Professor Wachter will report his recommendations to the secretary of state for health and the National Information Board in June 2016.

Members of the National Advisory Group on health IT in England (the review board) are:

  • Robert Wachter, MD, (Chair) Professor and Interim Chairman, Department of Medicine,University of California, San Francisco
  • Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, Associate Professor, Schools of Information and of Public Health, University of Michigan
  • David Brailer, MD, PhD, CEO, Health Evolution Partners (current); First U.S. National Coordinator for Health IT (2004-6)
  • Sir David Dalton, CEO, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, UK
  • Dave deBronkart, Patient Advocate, known as “e-Patient Dave”
  • Mary Dixon-Woods, MSc, DPhil, Professor of Medical Sociology, University of Leicester, UK
  • Rollin (Terry) Fairbanks, MD, MS, Director, National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare; Emergency Physician, MedStar Health (U.S.)
  • John Halamka, MD, MS, Chief Information Officer, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Professor, Harvard Medical School
  • Crispin Hebron, Learning Disability Consultant Nurse, NHS Gloucestershire
  • Tim Kelsey, Advisor to UK Government on Health IT
  • Richard Lilford, PhD, MB, Director, Centre for Applied Health Research and Delivery, University of Warwick, UK
  • Christian Nohr, MSc, PhD, Professor, Aalborg University (Denmark)
  • Aziz Sheikh, MD, MSc, Professor of Primary Care Research and Development, University of Edinburgh
  • Christine Sinsky, MD, Vice-President of Professional Satisfaction, AMA; Primary care internist, Dubuque, Iowa
  • Ann Slee, MSc, MRPharmS, ePrescribing Lead for Integrated Digital Care Record and Digital Medicines Strategy, NHS England
  • Lynda Thomas, CEO, MacMillan Cancer Support, UK
  • Wai Keong Wong, MD, PhD, Consultant Haematologist, University College London Hospitals; Inaugural chair, CCIO Leaders Network Advisory Panel
  • Harpreet Sood, MBBS, MPH, Senior Fellow to the Chair and CEO, NHS England and GP Trainee

Comment

Perhaps egged on by one or two major suppliers in behind-the-scenes lobbying, Hunt has apparently found billions to spend on improving NHS IT.

Nobody doubts that NHS IT needs improving.  But nearly all GPs have impressive systems, as do many hospitals.  But the systems don’t talk to each other.

The missing word  from the review board’s terms of reference is interoperability. True, it’s difficult to achieve. And it’s not politically aggrandizing to find money for making existing systems interoperable.

But at present you can have a blood test at the GP, then a separate blood test at the local hospital and the full results won’t go on your electronic record because the GP and hospital are on different systems with no interoperability between them.

If you’re treated at a specialist hospital for one ailment, and at a different hospital 10 to 20 (or say 100) miles away for something else, it may take weeks for your electronic record to reflect your latest treatment.

Separate NHS sites don’t always know what each other is doing to a patient, unless information is faxed or posted between them.

The fax is still one of the NHS’s main modes of cross-county communication. The DoH wants to be rid of the fax machine but it’s indispensable to the smooth running of the NHS, largely because new and existing systems don’t talk to each other.

The trouble with interoperability – apart from the ugliness of the word – is that it is an unattractive concept to some of the major suppliers, and to DoH executives, because it’s cheap, not leading edge and may involve agreements on data sharing.

Getting agreements on anything is not the DoH’s forte. [Unless it’s an agreement to spend more money on new technology, for the sake of having up-to-date technology.]

Last year I broke my ankle in Sussex and went to stay in the West Midlands at a house with a large ground floor and no need to use stairs. There was no communication between my local GP and the NHS in the West Midlands other than  by phone, post or fax, and even then only a summary of healthcare information went on my electronic record.

I had to carry my x-rays on a CD. Then doctors at my local orthopaedic department in Sussex found it difficult to see the PACS images because the hospital’s PCs didn’t have CD players.

A government employee told me this week of a hospital that gave medication to a patient in the hope she would not have an adverse reaction. The hospital did not have access to the patient’s GP records, and the patient was unsure of the name of the medication she’d previously had an allergic reaction to.

Much of the feedback I have had from those who have enjoyed NHS services is that their care and treatment has been impeded by their electronic records not moving with them across different NHS sites.

Mark Leaning, visiting professor, at University College, London, in a paper for health software supplier EMIS, says the NHS is “not doing very well when it comes to delivering a truly connected health system in 2016. That’s bad for patient outcomes.”

That GPs and their local hospital often cannot communicate electronically  is a disgrace given the billions various governments have spent on NHS IT.  It is on interoperability that any new DoH IT money needs to be spent.

Instead,  it seems huge sums will be wasted on the pie-in-the-sky objective of a paperless NHS by 2020. The review board document released today refers to the “ambition of a paper- free health and care system by 2020”.

What’s the point of a paperless NHS if a kaleidoscope of new or existing systems don’t properly communicate?

Congratulations, incidentally, to GP software suppliers TPP and EMIS. They last year announced direct interoperability between their core clinical systems.

Their SystmOne and EMIS Web systems hold the primary care medical records for most of the UK population.

And this month EMIS announced that it has become the first UK clinical systems provider to implement new open standards for interoperability in the NHS.

It says this will enable clinicians using its systems to securely share data with any third party supplier whose systems comply with a published set of open application programme interfaces.

The Department of Health and ministers need to stop announcing things that will never happen such as a paperless NHS and instead focus their attention – and any new IT money – on initiatives that are not subconsciously aimed at either political or commercial gain.

It would be ideal if they, before announcing any new IT initiative, weighed up diligently whether it is any more important, and any more of a priority, than getting existing systems to talk to each other.

Review of information technology in the NHS

EMIS implements open standards

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, consultants, culture, Department of Health, Government IT, health, health records, HSCIC, IT-related failures, NHS, npfit, PACS, supplier relationships

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Yet another NHS IT mess?

Posted on 09/07/2015 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Last week the National Audit Office reported on the failure of the GP Extraction Service. Health officials  had signed off and paid for a contract even though the system was unfit for use.

The officials worked for organisations that have become part of the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

An unapologetic HSCIC issued a statement on its website in response to the Audit Office report. It said, in essence, that the problems with the GP Extraction Service were not the fault of the HSCIC but rather its predecessor organisations (ignoring the fact that many of the officials and contractors from those defunct organisations moved to the HSCIC).

Now it transpires that the HSCIC may have a new IT-related mess on its hands, this time one that is entirely of its own making – the e-Referral Service.

Last month the HSCIC went live with its e-Referral service without testing the system properly. It says it tested for thousands of hours but still the system went live with 9 pages of known problems.

Problems are continuing. Each time in their routine bulletins officials suggest that an upgrade will solve e-Referral’s problems. But each remedial upgrade is followed by another that does not appear to solve the problems.

The system went live on 15 June, replacing Choose and Book which was part of an earlier NHS IT disaster the £10bn National Programme for IT.

Problems more than teething?

Nobody expects a major new IT system to work perfectly first time but regular outages of the NHS e-Referral Service may suggest that it has more than teething problems.

It’s a common factor in IT-based project failures that those responsible have commissioned tests for many hours but with inadequately designed tests that did not always reflect real-world use of the system. They might also have underestimated loads on the available hardware and networks.

This means that after the system goes live it is brought down for regular hardware and software fixes that don’t solve the problems.  End-users lose faith in the system – as many GPs did with the Choose and Book system – and a misplaced optimism takes the place of realism in the thinking of managers who don’t want to admit the system may need a fundamental redesign.

On the day the e-Referral Service launched, a Monday, doctors had difficulties logging in. Software “fixes” that day made little difference. By the next day HSCIC’s optimism has set in. Its website said:

“The NHS e-Referral Service has been used by patients and professionals today to complete bookings and referrals comparable with the number on a typical Tuesday but we were continuing to see on-going performance and stability issues after yesterday’s fixes.

“We suspend access to the system at lunchtime today to implement another fix and this improved performance and stability in the afternoon.”

The “fix” also made little apparent difference. The next day, Wednesday 17 June, the entire system was “unavailable until further notice” said the HSCIC’s website.

By early evening all was apparently well. An HSCIC bulletin said:

“The NHS e-Referrals Service is now available again. We apologise for the disruption caused to users and thank everyone for their patience.”

In fact, by the next day, Thursday 18 June, all was not well. Said another bulletin:

“Yesterday’s outage enabled us to implement a number of improvements and hopefully this is reflected in your user experience today.

“This morning users reported that there were ongoing performance issues so work has now taken place to implement changes to the configuration to the NHS e-Referral Service hardware and we are currently monitoring closely to see if this resolved the issue.”

About 2 weeks later, on 30 June, HSCIC’s officials said there were ongoing problems, because of system performance in provider organisations that were processing referrals.

Was this HSCIC’s way of, again, blaming other organisations – as they did after the NAO report’s on the failure of the GP Extraction Service project? Said a statement on the HSCIC’s website on 30 June 2015:

“Since transition to the NHS e-Referral Service on Monday 15th June, we have unfortunately experienced a number of problems… Although most of the initial problems were related to poor performance of the system, some residual functional and performance issues persist and continue to affect some of our colleagues in their day-to-day working.

“Most of these on-going problems relate to the performance of the system in provider organisations that are processing referrals, though this does of course have a knock-on effect for referrers.

“Please be assured that the team are working to identify root causes and fixes for these issues.”

By last week – 2 July 2015 – HSCIC warned that it will require a “period of planned downtime on the NHS e-Referral Service tonight which is currently scheduled for between 21:00 and 23:00 for some essential maintenance to fix a high priority functional Incident.”

The fix worked – or did it? HSCIC told Government Computing: “An update was applied to the system overnight from Thursday (July 2) into Friday (July 3) which was successful.”

But …

Monday 6 July 2015 4.15pm. HSCIC e-Referral Service bulletin:

“We would like to apologise for the interruption to service between 13:15 and 13:54 today.  This was not a planned outage and we are investigating the root cause.  If any remedial activity is required we will give notice to all users. Once again please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this caused.”

Why was testing inadequate?

Did senior managers go live without testing how the system would work in the real world, or did they select as test end-users only IT enthusiasts?

Perhaps managers avoided challenging the test system too much in case it gave poor results that could force a redesign.

We probably won’t know what has gone wrong unless the National Audit Office investigates. Even then it could be a year or more before a report is published. A further complicating factor is that the HSCIC itself may not know yet what has gone wrong and may be receiving conflicting reports on the cause or causes of the problems.

An IT failure? – change the organisation’s name

What’s certain is that the NHS has a history of national IT project failures which cause organisational embarrassment that’s soon assuaged by changing the name of the organisation, though the officials and contractors just switch from one to the next.

NHS Connecting for Health, which was largely responsible for the NPfIT disaster, was blended into the Department of Health’s informatics function which was then blended into the HSCIC.

Similarly the NHS Information Centre which was largely responsible for the GP Extraction Service disaster was closed in 2013 and its staff and contractors blended into the HSCIC.

Now, with the e-Referral Service, the HSCIC at least has a potential IT project mess that can be legitimately regarded as its own.

When will a centrally-run national NHS IT-based turn out to be a success? … care.data?

New SRO

Meanwhile NHS England is looking for a senior responsible owner for e-Referral Service on a salary of up to £98,453.

Usually in central government, SROs do the job as an adjunct to their normal work. It’s unusual for the NHS to employ a full-time project SRO which the NAO will probably welcome as a positive step.

But the job description is vague. NHS England says that the SRO for NHS e-Referrals programme will help with a switch from paper to digital for 100% of referrals in England by March 2018.

“The SRO … will have responsibility for the strategic and operational development of the digital journey, fulfilment of the patient and clinical process and the performance of the service. Plans to achieve the strategy will be underpinned by the delivery of short to medium term objectives, currently commissioned from HSCIC and other third party suppliers.”

Key aspects of this role will be to:-

– Ensure the strategy is formulated, understood by all stakeholders and is delivered utilising all available resources efficiently and effectively.

– Ensure the development and management of plans.

– Ensure appropriate system and processes are in place to enable the uptake and on-going use of digital referrals by GP’s, hospitals, patients and commissioners.

– Proactively manage the key risks and issues associated with ensuring appropriate actions are taken to mitigate or respond.

– Monitor and establish accountability on the overall progress of the strategy to ensure completion within agreed timescales.

– Manage the budgetary implications of activity.

– Avoid the destabilisation of business as usual.

– Manage and actively promote the relationships with key stakeholders.

The job will be fixed-term until 31/03/2017 and interviews will be held in London on the 20th July 2015.

The big challenge will be to avoid the destabilisation of business as usual – a challenge beyond the ability of one person?

Government Computing. 

Another fine NHS IT mess

Why was e-Referral Service launched with 9 pages of known problems?

National e-Referral Service unavailable until further notice

 

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, consultants, e-health, e-Referral Service, Government IT, HSCIC, IT-related failures, National Audit Office, NHS, npfit, operational issues

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Why was NHS e-Referral service launched with 9 pages of known problems?

Posted on 17/06/2015 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Were GPs guinea pigs for live testing of the new national NHS e-Referral Service?

Between 2004 and 2010 the Department of Health marked as confidential its lists of problems with national NPfIT systems, in particular Choose and Book.

So the Health and Social Care Information Centre deserves praise for publishing a list of problems when it launched the national “e-Referrals” system on Monday. But that list was 9 pages long.

The launch brought unsurprised groans from GPs who are used to new national systems going live with dozens of known problems.

The e-Referral Service, built on agile “techniques” and based on open source technology, went live early on Monday to replace “Choose and Book” for referring GP patients to hospitals and to other parts of the NHS.

Some GPs found they could not log on.

“As expected – cannot refer anything electronically this morning. Surprise surprise,” said one GP in a comment to “Pulse” on its article headlined “Patient referrals being delayed as GPs unable to access e-Referrals system on launch day.”

A GP practice manager said: “Cannot access in south London. HSCIC debacle…GPs pick up the pieces. Changing something that wasn’t broken.”

Another GP said: “I was proud never to have used Choose and Book once. Looks like this is even better!”

Other GPs said they avoided using technology to refer patients.

“Why delay referral? Just send a letter. (Some of us never stopped).”

Another commented: “I still send paper referrals – no messing, you know it has gone, no time wasted.”

Dr Faisal Bhutta, a GP partner in Manchester, said his practice regularly used Choose and Book but on Monday morning he couldn’t log in. “You can’t make a referral,” he said.

The Health and Social Care Information Centre has apologised for the disruption. A statement on its website says:

“There are a number of known issues, which are currently being resolved. It is not anticipated that any of these issues will pose a clinical safety risk, cause any detriment to patient care or prevent users from carrying out essential tasks. We have published the list of known issues on our website along with details of how to provide feedback .”

But why did the Centre launch the e-Referral Service with 9 pages of known problems? Was it using GPs as guinea pigs to test the new system?

Comment

The Health and Social Care Information Centre is far more open, less defensive and a better communicator than the Department of Health ever was when its officials were implementing the NPfIT.

But is the HSCIC’s openness a good thing if it’s accompanied by a brazen and arrogant acceptance that IT can be introduced into the NHS without a care whether it works properly or not?

In parts of the NHS, IT works extraordinarily well. Those who design, test, implement and support such systems care deeply about patients. In many hospitals the IT reduces risks and helps to improve the chances of successful outcomes.

But in other parts of the NHS are some technology enthusiasts – at the most senior board level – who seem to believe that all major IT implementations will be flawed and will be improved by user feedback.

The result is that IT that’s inadequately designed, tested and implemented is foisted on doctors and nurses who are expected to get used to “teething” troubles.

This is dangerous thinking and it’s becoming more and more prevalent.

Many poorly-considered implementations of the Cerner Millennium electronic patient record system have gone live in hospitals across England with known problems.

In some cases, poor implementations – rather than any faults with the system itself – have affected the care of patients and might have contributed to unnecessary deaths when records needed urgently were not available, or hospitals lost track of urgent appointments.

A CQC report in March 2015 said IT was a possible factor in the death of a patient because NHS staff were unable to access electronically-held information.

In another incident a coroner criticised a patient administration system for being a factor in the death of three year-old Samuel Starr whose appointment for a vital scan got lost in the system.

Within NHS officialdom is a growing cultural acceptance that somehow a poor IT implementation is different to a faulty x-ray machine that delivers too high a dose of radiation.

NHS officials will always brush off IT problems as teething and irrelevant to the care and safety of patients. Just apologise and say no patient has come to any harm.

So little do IT-related problems matter in the NHS that unaccountable officials at the HSCIC have this week felt sufficiently detached from personal accountability to launch a national system knowing there are dozens of problems with the use of it.

Their attitude seems to be: “We can’t know everything wrong with the system until it’s live. So let’s launch the system and fix the problems as GPs give us their feedback.”

This is a little like the NHS having a template letter of regret to send to relatives and families of patients who die unexpectedly in the care of the NHS. Officials simply fill in the appropriate name and address. The NHS can then fix the problems as and when patients die.

It’s surely time that bad practice in NHS IT was eradicated.  Board members need to question more. When necessary directors must challenge the blind positivism of the chief executive.

Some managers can learn much about the culture of care at the hospitals that implement IT successfully.

Patients, nurses and doctors do not exist to tell hospital managers and IT suppliers when electronic records are wrong, incomplete, not available or are somebody else’s record with a similar name.

And GPs do not exist to be guinea pigs for testing and providing feedback on new national systems such as the e-Referral Service.

e-Referral Service “unavailable until further notice”

Hundreds of patients lost in NPfIT systems

Hospital has long-term NPfIT problems

An NPfIT success at Croydon? – Really?

Physicians’ views on electronic patient records

Patient record systems raise some concerns, says report

Electronic health records and safety concerns

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change management, Choose and Book, Department of Health, e-health, e-Referral Service, Government IT, health, health records, HSCIC, IT successes, IT-related failures, LPfIT, NHS, npfit, open source, open standards, operational issues, procurement, project management

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50,000 on waiting list and cancer test delays after NPfIT go-live

Posted on 17/06/2014 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Croydon hospitals have built up a waiting list of 50,000 patients since a Cerner electronic patient record system go-live last October, according the trust’s latest board papers.

And, since the go-live, more than 2,200 patients have waited at least 6 weeks for diagnostic tests, of which 160 have been identified as “urgent suspected cancer and urgent patients”.  This backlog may take until the end of August to clear, say the board papers of the Croydon Health Services NHS Trust which includes Croydon’s Mayday Hospital, now the University Hospital.

The trust has declared a “serious incident” as a result of the diagnostics backlog. An SI can be reported when there is possibility of unexpected or avoidable death or severe harm to one or more patients.

“No harm”

The trust concedes that its waiting times pose a “potential clinical risk” but the board papers say several times that there is no evidence any patient has come to harm.  This assurance has been questioned by some trust board members. The trust continues to investigate.

Croydon is the latest in a long line of trusts to have had serious disruption after a Cerner go-live under the NPfIT, with BT as the installation partner.

The trust has kept the implications for patients confidential. This may contravene the NHS’s “duty of candour” – to report publicly on things that go wrong. The duty has come about in the wake of the suffering of hundreds of people in the care of Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust.

Croydon Health Services NHS Trust has decided not to publish its “Cerner Deep Dive” or Cerner “Lessons Learnt” reports, and discussions on the reports have been in Part 2 confidential sections of board meetings.

The trust defended its “Part 2” approach in its statement (below).

Meanwhile the Health and Social Care Information Centre, which runs the NPfIT local service provider contracts, including BT’s agreement to supply Cerner to hospitals in London,  has commissioned Cerner to capture the benefits nationally of Cerner installations.

Q&A

My questions and points to the trust, and its responses are below.

From me to the trust:

Croydon had good reasons to go live with Cerner, and DH funding was a further incentive but the trust does not appear to have been in a position to go live – at any stage – with a Big Bang Cerner implementation. The 7 aborted official go-live dates might have been a sign of why.  It would have been a brave decision to cancel the implementation, especially as:

–  the trust had spent 2 years preparing for it

– DH, BT and Cerner had put a lot of work into it

– there was DH pressure to go live especially after all the missed go-live dates.

The latest board papers say 6 or more times in different places that there has been no harm to patients as a result of the delays and waits.  Some members have raised questions on this and there is the matter of whether the trust is commissioning its own assessments (marking its own work).

On this:

– 50,000 on waiting list

– Cerner deep dive not published

– Lessons Learnt not published (concealment of failures, against the spirit of duty of candour called for by Robert Francis QC and Jeremy Hunt?)

– Diagnostics – an SI reported. The trust has considered the contributing issues which related to Cerner implementation but has not published details of the discussion. Again a concealment of failures?

– An accumulation of over 2,200 patients that were waiting over 6 weeks for diagnostics. Out of that number 160 patients were identified as urgent suspected cancer (USC) and urgent patients.  Can the trust – and patients – be sure there has been no harm?

– “… external assurance through an external clinician will provide the assurance that no patients have suffered harm as a result of the length of the waiting times”. Bringing in an external clinician to provide an assurance no patients have been harmed seems to pre-judge the outcome.  The trust appears to be marking its own work, especially as the backlog of patients awaiting diagnostics may not be cleared until the end of August.

– Managing public and GP perceptions? “Members agreed that GP interactions should be held off until the investigations had produced definite findings. However the Communications Department are on standby to publish information to GPs if required, and the Trust is ready to react to other enquiries. The Trust will in any event publish the incident report after the investigation has been completed.”

– “… the implementation of Cerner in October 2013 had an impact on activity levels and the delivery of RTT standards”. Again no report on this published.

– “An independent assessor would re-check all patients to assure that no harm has resulted. The Committee noted the progress report and requested that this is referred to a Part 2 meeting of the Trust Board …” Concealment of failures again?

– In the past the DH has been prepared to treat patients as guinea pigs in Cerner Big Bang implementations. The philosophy appears to be that the implementations will inevitably be disruptive but it’s for the good of patients in the longer term. That this approach may be unfair on patients in the short term, however, seems not to trouble the NHS hierarchy.

It’s clear clinicians and IT staff are doing their best and working hard for the benefit of patients but the implementation was beyond their control. Meanwhile complaints are increasing, Croydon Health Services was one of the lowest rated trusts for overall patient experience and a sizeable minority of local residents don’t choose the local hospitals for care or treatment. That said some patients rate their care very highly on NHS Choices (although some don’t). The University hospital is rated 2.5 stars out of 5.

One of the most surprising statements in the board papers is this: “… despite the weaknesses in the programme, the overall success of the deployment had been recognised at a national level”. A success? Can the trust in essence say what it likes? Nobody knows for sure what the facts are, given that the trust decides on what to publish and not to publish.

The trust’s response to the above points and questions:

“Due to a temporary failure of our administrative systems, the Trust found in February 2014 that a number of patients who needed to be seen by the imaging service were in breach of the six week waiting standard.

“We have taken immediate action to correct this and are undertaking a thorough review to confirm that no patients were harmed as a result.  The Trust is now working hard to treat patients currently on our waiting lists.  This is referenced in our publicly available Board papers.

“CRS Millennium has delivered a number of improvements that support improving patient experience at the Trust, including more efficient management of medicines, more detailed patient information being conveyed between shifts and departments and better management of beds within the organisation.”

Lessons?

Below are some of the lessons from Croydon’s Cerner go-live. Although the trust hasn’t published its “Lessons Learnt” report, some of lessons are mentioned in its latest board papers:

  • Insufficient engagement from operational and clinical colleagues
  • Time pressures were felt when a full dress rehearsal stretched the capabilities of the information team.
  • Insufficient time and resources were allocated to completion of the outline business and full business cases, as well as to due diligence on the options and costs.  [Business cases for Cerner are still unpublished.]
  • Trust directors agreed that a business case for a project of the size and complexity of the CRS Millennium should have taken longer than 6 weeks to prepare.
  • A failure of senior managers to take stock of the project at its key stages.
  • Too strong a focus on technical aspects
  • Clinicians not always fully appreciating the impact of the changes the system would deliver
  • The hiring of an external change manager to lead the deployment who proved to be “less than wholly successful because of the resulting deficiency in previous experience or knowledge of the culture of the organisation”.
  • The individual left the organisation part way through deployment which led to further challenges.
  • The right people with the right skills mix were not in place at the outset to achieve the transformational change necessary to successfully deploy a new system such as CRS

Comment 

NHS trusts have good reason to modernise their IT using the widely-installed  Cerner electronic patient record system, especially  if it’s a go-live under the remnants of the NPfIT, in which case hospitals receive DH funding and gain from having BT as their installation partner.

But why does a disruption that borders on chaos so often follow NPfIT Cerner implementations? Perhaps it’s partly because the benefits of Cerner, and the extra work required by nurses and doctors and clerical staff to harvest the benefits, is underestimated.

It is in any case difficult to convey to busy NHS staff that the new technology will, in the short-term, require an increase in their workload. Staff and clinicians will need to capture more data than they did on the old system, and with precision. The new technology will change how they work, so doctors may resent it initially, especially as there may be shortcomings in the way it has been implemented which will take time to identify and solve.

The problem with NPfIT go-lives is that they take place in an accountability void. Nobody is held responsible when things go badly wrong, and it’s easy for trusts to play down what has gone wrong. They have no fear of authoritative contradiction because they keep their implementation assessments confidential.

What a difference it would make if trusts had an unequivocal duty of candour over electronic health record – EHR – deployments. They would not be able to go live until they were ready.

The disruption that has followed NPfIT Cerner go-lives has been serious. Appointments and tests for suspected cancer have been lost in the administrative confusion that follows go-live. There have been backlogs of appointments for tens of thousands of patients. Operating theatres have gone under-used because of mis-scheduled appointments.

Now and again a patient may die unnecessarily but the problems have been regarded by the NHS centrally as collateral damage, the price society pays for the technological modernisation of the NHS.

Richard Granger, when head of the NPfIT, said he was ashamed of some Cerner installations. He described some of them as “appalling” but since he made his comments in 2007, some of the Cerner installations have been more disruptive than those he was referring to.

Provided each time there is no incontrovertible evidence of harm to patients as a result of a go-live, officials give the go ahead for more NPfIT Cerner installations.

Guinea pigs?

Disruption after go-live is too often treated as an administrative problem. Croydon’s statement refers to a “temporary problem with our administrative systems”. But new patient record systems can harm patients, as the inquest on 3-year-old Samuel Starr heard.

It’s time officials stopped regarding patients as guinea pigs in IT go-lives. It compounds the lack of accountability when trusts such as Croydon keep the reports from the go-live secret.

Trusts need better technological support but not at the cost of treating any harm to patients as collateral damage.

A tragic outcome for Cerner implementation at Bath?

Openness and honesty is a rarity after health IT problems

Mishandled electronic health record transition

A botched Cerner EHR implementation?

Trinity Medical Center reaches Cerner settlement

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, Department of Health, health, health records, HSCIC, LPfIT, NHS, npfit, openness and transparency, SPfIT

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A tragic outcome for Cerner Millennium implementation at Bath?

Posted on 04/03/2014 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Three year-old Samuel Starr died in the arms of his parents as his they read him his favourite stories at the local hospital. 

At an inquest this week his parents, and specialists, raised questions about whether long delays in arranging appointments on a new Cerner Millennium system at Bath’s Royal United Hospital, which replaced an old “TDS” patient administration system, was a factor in his death.

Ben Peregrine, the speciality manager for paediatrics at the RUH in Bath,  told the inquest:

“Samuel’s appointment request must have fallen through the cracks between the old and new system.”

After successful heart surgery at 9 months, Samuel should have had regular scans to see if his condition had worsened. But he didn’t have any scans for 20 months, in part because of difficulties in organising the appropriate appointments on Bath’s new Millennium systems.

Though there is no certainty, Samuel may be alive today if he’d had the scans.

In a review of Samuel’s death, which took place in November 2012, the details of which have only just been made public, Bristol Children’s Hospital concluded that appointment delays might have played a part.

It said: “Death was felt to be possibly modifiable if [there had been] earlier surgery before cardiac function deteriorated.”

Samuel had his first surgical procedure, open heart surgery at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children, on 3 March 2010. He was discharged six days later, and referred to the Paediatric Cardiac Clinic at the Royal United Hospital in Bath for check-ups.

This week’s inquest heard that the first check-up took place in Bristol in October 2010, when an echocardiogram, also known as an ‘echo’, was carried out. Samuel’s parents, Paul Starr and Catherine Holley, expected a follow-up appointment in January 2012 but by March they’d not received one.

Their community nurse rang the hospital five times in as many months for a follow-up appointment but could not arrange one. When another echo was eventually taken in June 2012 – 20 months after the first – it was found that Samuel needed urgent surgery which proved more complicated than expected. He died on 6 September 2012.

Paul Starr told the BBC that during the long delays in obtaining an appointment for a further scan Samuel’s heart function went from good to bad. He said: “It is not like he had bad care in that time. He had no care at all.”

Ben Peregrine, the speciality manager for paediatrics at the hospital, told the inquest:

“The new system is now up and running as best as it can be, but as long as there is still humans entering the information there will always be room for error.”

The BBC reported that the delay in Samuel’s treatment “came after a new computerised appointment booking system was introduced at the RUH in 2011. It was only after an appointment had been set that doctors discovered the three-year-old, from Frome in Somerset, needed open heart surgery.”

BBC West’s Inside Out obtained a hospital document “Issues for discussion including any action or learning to be taken as a result of the child’s death. Issues that require broader multi-agency discussion” that has as its first bullet point:

“Failure of the RUH Millennium computer software to organise appointments at the designated time leading to a delay of three months before Samuel was seen by (redacted) in Bath.

“Parents have since told me that Samuel had not had an ECHO for 20 months prior to June 2012. At his previous cardiac appointment (April 2011) [redacted] failed to carry out an ECHO because he was not expecting to see Samuel despite Samuel’s parents being sent an appointment for this day.”

It appears that events at Bath after the Cerner go-live have, in the main, followed a pattern at a dozen or so other trusts that have installed the Millennium system.

The pattern was outlined in a Campaign4change post in December 2012:

– go-live

– chaos

– a trust admission that potential problems, costs and risks were underestimated

– a public apology to patients

– a trust promise that the problems have been fixed

– trust board papers that show the problems haven’t been fixed or new ones have arisen

– ongoing difficulties producing statutory and regulatory reports

– provision in trust accounts for unforeseen costs

– continuing questions about the impact of the new system on patients

– a drying-up of information from the trust on the full consequences of the EPR implementation, other than public announcements on its successful aspects.

Catherine Holley, Samuel’s mother, believes the Millennium implementation at the Royal United Hospital at Bath might have followed the above cycle.

Bath went live with Cerner Millennium at the end of July 2011. An upbeat trust statement at the time to E-Health Insider said:

“We can confirm that the new Cerner Millennium IT system successfully went live on Friday 29 July – as planned – at Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Trust.

“BT and Cerner worked closely with the trust and the Southern Programme for IT on the implementation over the past year – a complex and major change management programme.”

As part of its investigation into Samuel’s death, the BBC asked the RUH how many appointments were overdue to delayed because of the new computer system. Said the BBC’s Inside Out West programme:

“They told us there were 63 overdue appointments some with delays of up to 2 years before they were discovered.”

Separately an FOI request to the trust on the Millennium installation brought the response that there have been 65 cardiac outpatients’ appointments “that have been identified as being were missed due to problems with the delayed and that occurred around implementation of Cerner Millennium… All of these appointments have been followed up and actioned as required.”

The RUH is not discussing Samuel Starr’s death. A spokesperson said the inquest is expected to give Samuel’s family and everyone involved in his care a clearer indication of the circumstances surrounding his death. “We have offered our sincere condolences to the family of Samuel Starr following his sad death.”

Contradictory

RUH Board reports on Millennium’s deployment have had a general “good news” tone. But some of the reports have mentioned potentially serious problems. This was in an RUH board report in 2011 on Millennium:

“… there were significant issues with clinic templates and data that had not been migrated. This affected encounters with long term follow up appointments. As a result this meant that there was unplanned downtime across Outpatients and backlogs developed in addition to those produced as a result of planned downtime”.

Comment:

What’s striking about the reports to the Bath board of directors on the Cerner Millennium implementation is their similarity, in tone and substance, to the “good news” reports of deployments of Millennium at other trusts.

The go lives are nearly always depicted as successes for clinicians that have had minor irritations for administrators.

Now we know from the RUH Bath’s implementation of Millennium that when appointments are delayed as a result of inadequate preparations for, and structural settlement of, a new patient administration system, it can be a matter of life and death.

Indeed the BBC, in its investigation into Samuel Starr’s short life, raises the question of whether delayed appointments have been a factor in other deaths.

But do trusts genuinely care about the bigger picture, or do they regard each case of harm or death as an individual, unique event, to be reviewed after the problems come to light?

At the RUH Bath, IT appears to be treated as a separate department, too little interweaved with care and treatment. Managers talked enthusiastically of smartcard use, the work of the service desk, the need for more printers, resolving BT outages, the benefits of the service security model, champion users and floorwalkers, completing the Readiness Workbook, and keeping the Deployment Hazard Document up to date – while the parents of Samuel Starr could not get an appointment on the new system for their son to have a vital heart scan.

In 2011 a senior executive at Bath told his trust staff: “Our partners BT and Cerner are describing it [the go-live of Cerner Millennium] as the smoothest deployment yet” and “we now have the foundation in place to meet the future needs of the Trust and the NHS”.

Will things improve?

The comment in my post of December 2012, which was about Royal Berkshire’s implementation of Cerner Millennium, seems apt so some it may be worth repeating (below).

“Some Cerner implementations go well and bring important benefits to hospitals and their patients. Some implementations go badly. One question the NHS doesn’t ask, but perhaps should, is: what level of problems is acceptable with a new electronic patient record system?

“It appears from some EPR implementations in the NHS that there is no such thing as a low point. No level of disruption or damage to healthcare is deemed unacceptable.

“Berkshire’s chief executive Edward Donald speaks the truth when he says that the trust’s implementation of Cerner was more successful than at other NHS sites. This is despite patients at his trust attending for clinics that did not exist, receiving multiple requests to attend clinics and not receiving follow-up appointments…

“The worrying thing for those who use the NHS is that, as far as new IT is concerned, it is like flying in a plane that has not been certified as safe – indeed a plane for which there has been no statutory requirement for safety tests. And if the plane crashes it’ll be easy for its operators and supplier to deny any responsibility. They can argue that their safety and risk ratings were at “green” or “amber-green”.

“The lack of interest in the NHS over the adverse effect on patients of patient record implementations means that trusts can continue to go ahead with high-risk electronic patient record system go-lives without independent challenge.”

This very thing seems to have happened at the RUH Bath – with possibly tragic consequences.

Thank you to openness campaigner Dave Orr for drawing my attention to the BBC’s investigation into Samuel Starr’s death.

RUH booking system might have contributed to boy’s death – BBC

Boy died after scan delay – BBC

Best Cerner Millennium implementation yet?

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, FOI, Freedom of Information, health, health records, HSCIC, IT projects, NHS, npfit, SPfIT, supplier relationships

BT earns £1.3bn extra from “dismantled” NHS IT scheme

Posted on 25/02/2014 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

The Department of Health paid BT £1.3bn more from the “dismantled” NHS IT contracts than the company first expected.

In 2004 BT expected £2.1bn from its contracts under the NHS IT scheme, the National Programme for IT. In fact BT’s payments totalled  £3.4bn to March 2013, according to information contained in a DH letter to the Public Accounts Committee.  The DH’s letter has gone unpublicised until now.

The size of the payments to BT, in the light of financial pressures elsewhere in the NHS, indicate that Connecting for Health, and its successor the Health and Social Care Information Centre,  regard BT’s data spine, the N3 broadband network,  and Cerner and Rio patient administration systems as indispensable.

The Public Accounts Committee has described the NHS IT scheme, the NPfIT,  as a “failed” programme.

Though important parts of BT’s work on the scheme have been successful, a national care records service in which an individual’s electronic patient record can be accessed across  the NHS, hasn’t materialised.

A cut-down version, the Summary Care Record, exists but the NHS and MPs regarded the creation of a detailed national electronic patient record as the main reason for the National Programme for IT.

Despite the extra money  is delivering far fewer Cerner Millennium systems to London’s acute trusts than originally intended, and none of the GP systems.

Payments to BT

After BT won three NPfIT contracts in 2003, the company said in its annual report of 2004 that the deals would be worth a total of £2.1 billion. The NHS deals were among “some of the largest BT has ever won”, said BT’s  2004 annual report. 

Now the DH’s letter to the Public Accounts Committee shows the amounts paid under NPfIT contracts to March 2013: 

  • N3 broadband network  – £937.7 m [BT]. Original contract value £533m.
  • Spine (including Secondary Uses Service)   £1.083.8m [BT]. Original contract value £620m.
  • Core contracts for local clinical systems in London (London Programme for IT, formerly part of the NPfIT ) –  £865.9m [BT]. Original contract value £996m. BT is delivering to far fewer trusts than it originally envisaged.
  •  Core contracts for the south of England – £586.3m. [BT]. No payments were due to BT for the south of England in the original contracts. BT replaced Fujitsu as the local service provider in the south. The DH spent a total of 737.3m on NPfIT contracts in the south of England to March 2013 but of this £151m had been paid to Fujitsu. The Fujitsu NPfIT local service provider contract is the subject of a protracted legal dispute between the company and the DH.

MP Richard Bacon, a member of the Public Accounts Committee, has criticised the size of some of the payments to BT.

Further payments are due to BT under the NPfIT contracts and it may also receive new payments for work under the Care.data project.

Comment

BT’s stunning financial success from the NHS IT scheme shows the value, from a supplier’s perspective, of getting a foot in the door. For some time it has been a monopoly supplier to the NHS. Its grip on the NHS, the HSCIC and the Department of Health, could be diminished if the HSCIC split up its work and awarded a set of new contracts. That is unlikely to happen. Indeed the signs are that some Whitehall officials would like to tie in the NHS to BT for the foreseeable future.

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Department of Health, e-health, health, health records, HSCIC, LPfIT, NHS, npfit

NHS database: is it a top IT priority?

Posted on 19/02/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

It’s called the NHS database but the new “giant” medical records system is to be run by the Health and Social Care Information Centre, largely for the benefit of researchers.

Though it may help patients in the longer term, say by helping to identify what treatments work and don’t, it is arguably not the NHS’s most immediate IT priority.

I said on BBC R4’s Today programme this morning that a top NHS IT priority is providing secure links to health records so that patients with acute and chronic illnesses can be treated in one part of the NHS one week and another part of the health service the following week – perhaps in a different county – and have their updated records accessible wherever they go.

At present patients with multiple problems can end up being treated in different NHS or non-NHS centres without each organisation knowing what the other is doing.  This is dangerous for patients and gives the impression the NHS is technologically backwards.

Links can be made to existing medical records – there are millions of electronic records already in the NHS – without creating a big central database. The records can reside where they are at the moment, inside and outside the NHS, and be linked to securely by clinicians and nurses, subject to the patient’s specific consent.

Indeed patients should be able to look at their record online and correct any mistakes.

Research database

My comment on BBC R4 Today that a research database is a good idea has brought a mixed response – understandably, because are risks. We need some facts from the Health and Social Care Information Centre on who is going to run the database, and how information will be made genuinely anonymous.

The HSCIC concedes in its information material that some patient information on the database will be potentially identifiable, but it implies this is acceptable if the organisations using the data can be trusted.

Why must information be potentially identifiable? And to what extent can the HSCIC be trusted to run the database? It is, after all, managing contracts under the National Programme for IT, a scheme which Jeremy Hunt called a “huge disaster”.

How much extra will be paid to BT which runs the SUS database under the “dismantled” NPfIT? It is likely that BT’s Spine and SUS-related work will link into the new “NHS database”. Have any new contracts gone to open competitive tender?

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, data sharing, Department of Health, e-health, Government IT, health, health records, HSCIC, LPfIT, NHS, npfit