Audit office is to take second look at NHS IT programme

doi:10.1136/bmj.333.7568.568-c

BMJ 2006;333:568 (16 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.333.7568.568-c

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Audit office is to take second look at NHS IT programme

London Michael Cross

The £12bn (€18bn; $22bn) programme to computerise the NHS in England faces a new investigation. Two months after it published a largely favourable report on the national programme for information technology (IT) (BMJ 2006;333:3-4, 1 Jul), the National Audit Office said that it plans a second study on the world’s largest civil IT scheme. One focus of the new study is likely to be the programme’s slower than expected progress in installing electronic patient record systems in acute hospitals.

Opposition MPs last week published a paper criticising the core of the programme, a national network “spine” that will allow authorised NHS staff to access patients’ records held by individual institutions.

The Conservative MP Richard Bacon, a member of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, and the Liberal Democrat’s health spokesman, John Pugh, said that the national IT programme was based on a “fundamental error,” which . . . [Full text of this article]

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