UK national health IT program may end
By Brian Robinson
Monday, December 07, 2009
The British and U.S. national health IT programs, which were at one time being compared as close siblings, seem to be going in different directions, with the U.K.’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT) headed for a possible postponement.
The nearly £13 billion ($21 billion) program is under fire because of its cost and could be chopped as early as this week as part of the U.K. government’s pre-budget report, which is due to be delivered by Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling on Wednesday.
Darling recently told the BBC that the NPfIT could be postponed to save money, according to a story in the London Times.
The U.K. has been especially hard hit by the recession, and is expected by many economists to be the worst affected of all the Western economies. Darling has warned of tough times ahead for the country, and that public spending will have to be reined in.
The seven-year old NPfIT is controversial and has increasingly fallen behind schedule. An earlier deadline of 2010 for the whole country to install electronic medical records will not be met, for example, with only 20 of the National Health Services’ total of 168 hospital trusts, or local public sector health care providers, having adopted them to date.
Accenture and Fujitsu, two of the main NPfIT contractors, withdrew in the past several years because of the surging cost of the program. Several trusts in the south of the country said they are giving up on the program and would try to restart previous systems.
The U.K. is due to hold a general election in 2010. Officials in the Conservative Party, currently favored to regain power next year, said they would call for a moratorium of government IT projects if it succeeds.
Meanwhile, the movement to develop a U.S. Nationwide Health Information Network is gaining steam with a slew of recent announcements, fueled by billions of dollars in investments provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
