Turmoil over NHS records scheme
Nicholas Timmins writes in the Financial Times:
The world’s biggest civilian IT project was thrown into turmoil yesterday after Alistair Darling implied it was going to be scrapped.
The chancellor told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show the £12.7bn NHS IT programme – already running years late – was “something that I think we don’t need to go ahead with just now “.
Treasury officials rushed to explain that the government was looking for “significant savings” of up to perhaps £600m over the medium term by cutting back some features that are less important for patients. A senior health department official, meanwhile, said bluntly that “the chancellor mis-spoke” in saying the project to create an electronic medical record would be scrapped.
Details of which elements would go were not clear last night. But the government would face compensation claims of many hundreds of millions of pounds if it cancelled the programme. Fujitsu, an IT provider, is already in mediation with the health department over its £700m compensation claim after it was fired last year.
