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."
great deal (Score:4, Interesting)
NHS software: open source it !! (Score:4, Interesting)
So, with all that money spent,
how can we, the taxpayer, get the
code open sourced ??
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, it's not just the software that cost all the money, all the fuck-ups along the way compounded and inflated the price tag way beyond what it should have been.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:4, Interesting)
That amount is not for the software and hardware alone. There has been a big reorganization of systems and computerization of records. Staff have been trained to use what has been delivered so far, and patients are being asked for permission to make their records available on the system. It's not a total write-off.
Re:This is what Ronald Regan protected us from (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, BS. I've been sued before (unsuccessfully) and my career is hardly over. I have to review the applications of new docs coming into our system and quite a number of them have been sued successfully in the past. We need to perform due diligence, so I look at the reviews of the case, it's almost invariably bizarre. A doc sued for not preventing a heart attack when the last time he saw the patient was eight months before the event. A radiologist sued for missing a breast cancer that only one expert witness (out of five) saw on a mammogram. And on and on.
If we see someone who is sued repeatedly, then you have a big red flag. But it is rarity for an experienced practitioner not to have been sued at least once.
And yes, 'defensive medicine' is real - cost estimates range from 10-20% of the US health care dollar, so it's quite significant. But it's hard to pin down exactly what is meant by defensive medicine. It's not just fear of being sued - more of it comes from the understandable desire to get the diagnosis correct. Nobody, but nobody, knows just what the 'right' level of medical testing is appropriate. I suspect this will remain true for quite some time. Even in diagnoses that have been studied carefully, like a lot of heart diseases, we still don't know what the best treatment strategy is when patients deviate from study populations (like having two diseases simultaneously, the horror).
Re:"Dayum!" (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they had lots of people that said the system was unusable.. There were priorities of error, and a priority 1 was a showstopper.
The places that consistently tested showed that the system for the first several years (already way past expected implementation date) for the Care Records part was seriously broken, and not fit for live use (bear in mind, this system isn't just supposed to be able to hold your office files, and it's fine if it's down for half an hour now and then, and perhaps lose a few things along the way with only a grumble; it holds your medical records.. The things that make the difference between life and death in some cases).
With things not working out on either side (again, for the Care Records parts; some parts, like PACS [Picture Archival and Communication System;the digitisation of your X-Rays instead of using film] work fine and are in almost universal use now, vastly changing the nature of care in the NHS.
The big problems with it were:
A) Tony Blair not having a clue what was wanted, but saying it should be done in a year.
B) Setting a guy in charge of it that failed his computing degree.. One Richard Granger [wikipedia.org]. It was pretty much his ideas that doomed the Care Records part of it, and allowed out a spec that was more a back of a cigarette packet sketch than a real spec.
C) Failing to have a real spec. Now the companies all bid for a very nebulous thing that said "You give us a lovely system that does what we want, and we'll give you billions.". Of course, they produced what they thought the NHS wanted, but the NHS discovered that it wasn't what they wanted. You know, basic Spec documentation you cover on computing. Which Granger failed.
D) There was also fault with the companies who leaped at the cash without a real spec.. They should have known that the contract was WAY too wooly and actually tied it down to real deliverables.
At renegotiation time, some of the vendors (like Fujitsu) worked out the cost of really doing what the NHS asked for (which was all the project management of the first round, plus a semi accurate spec). Which was a truly staggering figure. More than the NHS could stomach. The two are still in a legal scrap.
Some vendors still kept the lights on in the data centres, and hosted what was there, but those installations are likely going to have to move out of those data centres by about 2015, as they're too expensive to maintain for the few installs.. And none of the vendors want to renew the system contract.
So, the price tag covers all the allocation (it was scaled to host EVERY NHS hospital in the UK, which is most of them), training, consultancy, migration of data (a high precision activity that needs zero data loss on a vast amount of very complex information, coming out of a vast quantity of different databases, and being shoehorned into one uniform schema. Doing this while still providing clinical care (you don't get to shut a hospital down for ripping out the heart of its data systems and replacing them with a new; it's all done while still treating patients and making sure nothing gets mis-recorded).. Training of a huge number of clinical staff (doctors, nurses, and anyone else who needs to use the system inside the NHS), the feeds.. Interfaces between that system and the various disparate ones that it needs to communicate with inside a hospital..
When you look at it, it's a breathtaking proposal, just nobody on high seemed to recognise that, and expected fast results because they said so and waved a fat wallet around. Unsurprisingly it went awry. The current UK government looked at the figures, the legal position and the chances of getting it sorted from a more businesslike side, and canned the bits that wouldn't work (the care records area).
As for the data protection side, that was one of the most heavily guarded I've seen anywhere.. It was pretty robust. The few 'leaks' that happened (people looking at records they shouldn't) were spotted by access audit, and people lost the jobs.. That simple, that strict.