Abandoned UK National Health Service IT System Has Cost $16bn... So Far 220
dryriver writes with news of yet another major software project gone awry. From the article: "An abandoned National Health Service (NHS) patient record system has so far cost the taxpayer nearly £10bn, with the final bill for what would have been the world's largest civilian computer system likely to be several hundreds of millions of pounds higher, according a highly critical report from parliament's public spending watchdog. MPs on the public accounts committee said final costs are expected to increase beyond the existing £9.8bn because new regional IT systems for the NHS, introduced to replace the National Programme for IT, are also being poorly managed and are riven with their own contractual wrangles. When the original plan was abandoned the total bill was expected to be £6.4bn."
Lost cause (Score:5, Informative)
My father was contracted a few years ago as a consultant to help update the NHS's infrastructure. After a year working there for a year he ended his contract. He said that it was impossible to get anything done because the higher ups didn't listen to the engineers and project managers on the teams. There was also a lot of unmotivated and lazy people working on the teams that slowed everything down. Politics also played a big part and people cared more about keeping their comfy job that never really had an end date than finishing the project.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:4, Informative)
The silly thing is that 'obamacare' doesn't actually change anything. Same doctors, same hospitals, same procedures. No grandiose new projects. For most people, same insurance company. All it does is subsidize health insurance to make it affordable to those on low income - that's it.
Re:Wait, aren't these the guys that defined ITIL? (Score:3, Informative)
Dont forget PRINCE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRINCE2)
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is that every post on every site you see about "Obamacare" is an accusation with no facts to back it up, just like the post you replied to.
Fox News did two identical polls recently, the only difference being the term for the program "Affordable Care Act" or "Obamacare" was used. When there was a significantly higher percentage of people that liked the act when it's called the ACA than when it is called Obamacare.
The debate against Obamacare has been the most fact free debate that the U.S. has seen in years. It's a screen for every projection of every annoyance we have about healthcare in the U.S. The people that are preaching against it the loudest have no idea what it really is and they show it daily.
Contractor Failure (Score:4, Informative)
Before all the anti-government bozos show up to point and laugh:
However, 10 years on CSC has still not delivered the software and "not a single trust has a fully functioning Lorenzo care records system". This failure, the report said, was "extraordinary", while CSC was accused of a "failure to deliver" and "poor performance".
Yeah, that's a private corporation failing to perform/deliver. They're too busy focusing on cashing their checks, locking in their revenue stream, and paying their executives to actually deliver the product they agreed to.
What the government is bad at is managing contracts:
"systemic failure" in the government's ability to draw up and manage large IT contracts.
"there is still a long way to go before government departments can honestly say that they have learned and properly applied the lessons from previous contracting failures."
CSC should be sued for breach of contract, sued for fraud, sued for damages.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:3, Informative)
2009 just called. They want their blatant lies back.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:4, Informative)
I agree, but it has been mostly fact free because the law that was passed only dictates that the regulations need to be written, that is, we haven't really seen what the end result of the ACA passage will be.
Re:Lost cause (Score:4, Informative)
On the NHS projects I was working on, most things were working nicely on Sun systems. Then came this big idea that they should change everything and use Microsoft windows. Chaos ensued. I did what I could for about 2 years, but could just see the change going nowhere. In the meantime, the old systems just kept running.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:5, Informative)
The United States life expectancy of 78.4 years at birth, up from 75.2 years in 1990, ranks it 50th among 221 nations, and 27th out of the 34 industrialized OECD countries, down from 20th in 1990.[2][3] Of 17 high-income countries studied by the National Institutes of Health in 2013, the United States had the highest or near-highest prevalence of infant mortality, heart and lung disease, sexually transmitted infections, adolescent pregnancies, injuries, homicides, and disability. Together, such issues place the U.S. at the bottom of the list for life expectancy. On average, a U.S. male can be expected to live almost four fewer years than those in the top-ranked country.[4] According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the United States spent more on health care per capita ($8,608), and more on health care as percentage of its GDP (17.9%), than any other nation in 2011. The Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States last in the quality of health care among similar countries, and notes U.S. care costs the most. In a 2013 Bloomberg ranking of nations with the most efficient health care systems, the United States ranks 46th among the 48 countries included in the study.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
And finally, you can get private healthcare in the UK too.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:4, Informative)
It also doesn't work very well. Maybe if it was an actual government health cover system of some form rather than just chucking giant heaps of money at private insurance it would work better.