UK's NHS Will Drop Delayed E-Records Project 86
Centralized, electronic medical records are touted as a means of increasing efficiency and patient safety. The "centralizing" and "turning electronic" phases, though, have some very rough edges. An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the Guardian about one such digitization project in the UK: "An ambitious multibillion pound programme to create a computerised patient record system across the entire NHS is being scrapped, ministers have decided. The £12.7bn National Programme for IT is being ended after years of delays, technical difficulties, contractual disputes and rising costs."
Re:Of course Nation-wide Implementation Failed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Your example could hardly better contradict your point:
Universal healthcare in the UK (the NHS) was implemented nationwide in about 3 years, covering 50million people with comprehensive and free healthcare (give or take a modest prescription fee at the time). It replaced a complex network of private, state (county) and charity organizations, and came up against bitter opposition from the vested interests in private healthcare at the time. It has its limitation, but public support for it is consistently very strong.
I appreciate your point on IT systems is probably true, and this project is clearly a disaster - but expanding it to general provision of healthcare ignores every functional single-payer system in the world.