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from the so-much-for-project-management dept.
A UK government report (board minutes from the Health & Social Care Information Centre) says that the National Health Service has £5 billion worth of Information Technology projects at high risk of failure:
The ratings are based on gateway reports assessing the risk of four IT projects this year. All are related as "red" or "amber/red" meaning successful delivery is either impossible or extremely unlikely. Those projects include the remaining electronic health records contracts with BT and CSC, due to end in 2015 and 2016.
According to the HSCIC report, the £2.3bn CSC Local Service Provider (LSP) programme has now been flagged as "red", up from "amber/red" when the Major Projects Authority last released its rating for September 2014. Both programmes were originally started in 2003/2004 and have had an extremely troubled history.
Other high-rated projects on the list included the £168m NHSmail2 programme, to provide secure email across the NHS, which has slipped from "amber" to "amber/red".
NHSmail2 is an upgrade to the NHS's Microsoft Exchange based email system. Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and BT Health London have managed IT services for different divisions of England (CSC manages the North, Midlands & Eastern cluster, BT manages the London cluster).
Previously: UK National Health Service Dumps Oracle For FOSS NoSQL
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:50PM
Disclaimer: I gave up proper (i.e. paid) IT work a number of years ago following time out of the industry due to illness. A number of years later I got a job turning awful doctor-speak (and the ones who speak English as a first language are often the worst) into something a normal person can understand.
But yeah, I can confirm this, at least the bits I'm privy to from my position in the food chain and from the few people I still keep in contact with still doing that sort of job. A friend of a friend was working on the NHSMail project and what I heard was, quite frankly, terrifying in terms of what is being wasted.
Of note:
Our radiology system runs on Java. Very bad, very slow, probably unmaintained and tied to an ancient JRE Java.
All the applications that read patient data supposedly read it from the same place, yet can give results when accessing the same record.
Patient records are scanned into a central record system. This, in theory, should be great but as all the text is scanned as images, you can't search for anything within them. That would be a pointless exercise anyway as a) like all NHS software, it uses a proprietary window library and b) the indexing is broken in some fundamental way. Also, starting up the application wipes your current paste buffer because there's a trivial bug in the software that causes text pasted into patient records to delete itself when saved (I suspect it's a CR/LF issue triggered when copy/pasting from a Word document, but see my caveat above) and rather than fix that, it was easier to zap the paste buffer because after all, no-one will just re-copy/re-paste it!
I could go on, but having to deal with this utter shit every day is painful enough without describing it in gory detail when I've escaped for the day.
But yes, everything is a) shit, b) expensive, and c) it will only get worse as we've had successive governments (New Labour, Tory-Lib coalition, Tory) who have a massive hard-on for privatising every damn thing rather than trying to fix what we have. Funniest part of that? Surgery in the private sector carries a 30 day warranty. If anything goes wrong after that, you get to pay again. You get more of a guarantee on a £5 kettle, FFS. The NHS investigates and cures a fair few private healthcare failures, yet it's private healthcare lobbyists who are trying to get rid of the NHS. New head of NHS England is....a former private healthcare wonk.
The bits that work do that pretty well, but the gradual switch from a national, unified health service to a bunch of competing mini-health services (that is, in essence, what foundation trusts are) has screwed the NHS. The place I work for will be in special measures inside of 2 years thanks to a PFI contract (i.e. a giant mega-mortgage) and the board's wonderful idea of saving money by not providing services. Our shiny new MBAs (hired despite the recruitment freeze) are only accelerating the process.
FWIW, the classic case study for IT/procurement failures while I was in university (pushing 20 years ago now!) was...the London Ambulance Service. And NHSMail2 will, no doubt, be a classic case study for the class of tomorrow. NHS procurement is a disaster which, alongside the internal market and the reams of bullying, hectoring managers, is going to kill the NHS once and for all. IT may be a disaster, but it's one piece of a bigger picture, one that I'm not sure is solvable.
Never mind, eh? At least it isn't Corbyn and his band of Trots!