|
“Even worse, the document was produced by the very firms the Government is relying on to introduce the National Programme in three out of five regions across the country. It seems highly unlikely that the Lorenzo patient record system that iSOFT is supposed to be developing can ever be made to work on a scale and at a cost - and in a timeframe - which will meet the Government's targets”.
“It is now more clear than ever that the National
Programme for IT in the NHS is in meltdown. This Programme was conceived
in an ill-considered rush and announced by the Prime Minister with
optimistic hype. It has already cost taxpayers £1,500 million yet if it
fails the Programme will waste many times more than this, as well as the
effort, time and goodwill of thousands of clinical professionals and
health service managers across the country”.
“The NHS is just too big and too complex for its IT programme to be run
by some Stalinist monolith dreamed up on a sofa in No 10. Action is
needed at once to set up an IT programme that can actually meet the
needs of the NHS and its patients”.
The assessment was undertaken by two “Local Service Providers” under the
Programme, CSC and Accenture, who have contracted with iSOFT to provide
a key patient care record system called Lorenzo. This system would be
used by around 600,000 NHS clinicians and managers and affect perhaps 30
million patients. CSC and Accenture are responsible for introducing the
NPfIT in three out of five regions (North West/West Midlands, North
East, and Eastern). The document provides devastating evidence of major
problems and delays with Lorenzo, and suggests that this central part of
the NPfIT may never be properly completed.
The document divides Lorenzo issues into five broad categories, with
sub-topics under each. It then gives a red, green or amber
classification to each sub-topic, where red is defined raising an issue
needing immediate work, amber is an issue raising a potential risk, and
green is a topic raising no problem or risk. Of the 39 sub-topics, 13
are classified red, 21 are classified amber and only 5 are classified
green..
One key issue classified red is clinical safety. iSOFT only appointed Dr
Param Sandhu as clinical director for UK and Ireland in December 2005,
and the document states that “Dr Sandhu could not articulate the
timeframes for establishing a clinical safety team given the current
financial climate within iSOFT”. (NB At the beginning of February 2006,
the ISOFT share price was £3.50, now it is around 50p.)
Another key issue is scalability – i.e. whether the system work when
used by a very large number of people at once (perhaps 100,000). The
document states: “the strict adherence to standard development
procedures and bottom-up approach to component development and
requirement gathering has resulted in a product that does not meet LSP
performance requirements and evidence was not provided that the Lorenzo
product in its current form could scale to the instance sizes required.”
22 August 20066
|
|
PARLIAMENT:
MP says
Blair's NHS computer dream "won't work"
