“Few tears were shed when the chancellor, Alistair Darling, appeared to sound the death knell last month for the hugely costly NHS national programme for IT. Yet it turned out to be a premature obituary for the £12.7bn scheme, which, instead of being scrapped, will have £600m – less than 5% – cut from its costs.
The programme, one of the most ambitious IT projects in the world, is designed ultimately to provide staff in hospitals and GP surgeries with potentially life-saving electronic health records on everyone in England. But it has been beset by problems since its inception in 2002. As a result, parts of it – including the core patient record project – are years behind schedule, it is costing several billion pounds more to implement than initially forecast, and has become mired in controversy over privacy issues.”
Article
SA Mathieson, The Guardian, 13 January 2010
