Health IT hit by fresh crisis

Tuesday 19 April 2011
Print article

Close Window
By Nicholas Timmins, Public Policy Editor The National Health Service's £12.7bn programme to create an electronic patient record has been plunged in to yet another crisis after CSC, its biggest supplier, missed yet another series of deadlines and one of its key NHS partners walked away - saying it did not want the systems on offer. CSC has a £3bn contract to supply systems to the northern two-thirds of England.

Since November 2009 it has missed repeated deadlines to get its Lorenzo software working at Pennine Care, a mental health organisation, with the foundation trust announcing last week that it no longer wanted it.

CSC originally promised to have Lorenzo fully up and running at four pilot sites in 2008. After a series of missed deadlines, Christine Connelly , the NHS chief information officer, warned in April last year that the company was on the brink of being fired.

On Monday, however, Ms Connelly said the programme remained in discussions with CSC and was examining whether another mental health trust could become an "early adopter" for the long overdue software. It is made by iSoft, which CSC is currently negotiating to buy.

Richard Bacon, a Conservative MP on the Commons public accounts committee who has followed the electronic record programme closely, said: "Pennine Care Trust's withdrawal from the national programme for IT should be a body blow to CSC and iSoft. They have clearly failed, yet again".

He was "amazed" that Ms Connelly was trying to find another trust to take it. The programme, he said, was "supposed to help the NHS develop successful IT systems, not help to find new victims for these failed companies and their failed systems".

John Hoeksma, editor of E-health Insider , said: "There is now a big question over whether the government is either willing or able to terminate one of the largest IT contracts it inherited, in spite of publicly stated deadlines being repeatedly missed."

Asked to comment, CSC merely listed other parts of the contract that had gone well.

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of overall government IT, has been taking a growing interest, including extracting promises of performance from CSC executives in December.

It is likely that it will be examined by his new Major Projects Authority, with a view to reaching a final resolution over the CSC contract and an outstanding court case with Fujitsu, which was fired from the programme in May 2008 for failure to perform .

The health department is vigorously resisting a compensation claim from Fuitsu believed to be in the region of £700m. The company is the third biggest supplier of IT to central government, and Mr Maude may attempt to engineer a settlement in that case in order to clear the decks for action over CSC's contract.