Too little, too late!
The Guardian has picked up on the story first broken by E-Health Insider that CfH will be tendering for alternative approaches to electronic medical records.
E-Health Insider
Plans for a catalogue of ‘additional systems suppliers’ covering a wide range of specialist clinical systems are in the final stages of being drawn up by Connecting for Health (CfH), the agency responsible for delivering the £12.4bn NHS National Programme for IT.
E-Health Insider understands that the supplier catalogue plans being drawn up may cover all major departmental systems and clinical specialities, together with areas such as A+E, maternity and theatres. Services such as acute data migration and infrastructure are also thought to be covered.
Sources indicate that the plans – being termed Additional Systems Capacity and Capability (ASCC) – are at an advanced stage of development. “Granger’s [Richard Granger, head of CfH] team are working on it at the moment and trying to work out the details,” one senior source told EHI. “It’s in the pipeline.”
EHI understands that if negotiations are completed the plans could potentially due to be unveiled within weeks with an OJEU (Official Journal of the European Union) procurement, similar to that now underway for GP Systems of Choice (GPSoC).
CfH told E-health Insider: “Yes. NHS Connecting for Health is currently formulating an OJEU in support of the “Supplier Catalogue†announced by Richard Granger in October 2006. It is anticipated that this “Additional Services Capability and Capacity†(ASCC) OJEU will be issued during March. The GPSoC model, based on systems having to meet interoperability criteria and deliver broadly defined levels of functionality is thought to provide the template for the new catalogue.”
The NHS will start recruiting alternative software suppliers to its troubled £6.2bn IT upgrade project this month, in a move which could see the government’s vision for a single IT system for the health service in England unravelling.
The move is a tacit admission that a fully integrated IT system may never be completed. NHS bosses had until recently discouraged hospital trusts from deserting the scheme. But disaffection is now so widespread and delays so long that officials are working on a list of accredited alternative suppliers, which is widely seen as a move to appease hospital trusts.Under the government’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT), trusts were promised centrally bought software to be installed from mid-2004 - all free of charge to them or heavily subsidised. As a result, hospital trusts held back from buying new systems, content to get by with their old software in the belief that NPfIT would soon deliver replacements. But these have now been delayed for so long that trusts are seeking alternatives.
Trusts essentially stopped considering independent procurement from early 2001 leading to the early death of numerous innovative solutions, most of which could not recruit customers for love or money. I should know, I was leading one of them. There is very little likelihood though that I will be resurrecting my plans, even though I feel distinctly underwhelmed by most of the products on the market. There are far better ways for me to waste my time unless there is a radical change of personnel & policy at the DoH & CfH.
I wonder though how much of this IBA will take this into consideration when pricing Isoft as Lorenzo might not have much of a market when it is finally out of the incubator.