NHS Failure Analysis – United Kingdom
1. Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the failure reasons for the abandoned NHS project (NPfIT).
2. Background
NHS operating in the United Kingdom is the biggest public funded healthcare system. IT automation project, launched in 2002 by Prime Minister Tony Blair with an aim to connect patients with medical practitioners and hospitals.
NHS Information Management and Technology(IM&T) strategy designed in 90s was considered as a missed opportunity in healthcare information systems and that form the basis of NHS-IT automation project.
3. Scope
Scope was to replace paper based patient administration with electronic services like electronic patient care service records, automated appointment
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Such a big IT project involve a more detailed risk analysis, assessment and management. But it is evident that there were limited to no contingency or fallback plans for any major area of project like supplier and contractual process highlights the lack of fallback plans.
Patient awareness, confidentiality was a major risk which wasn’t taken into consideration during the planning phase.
There was an attempt to address the security risk by enabling electronic care record access through smart cards but on the same time it was agreed that medical staff can share their personal smart cards to access patient records which in itself looks like a breach to patient confidentiality and security.
4.6 Suppliers and Procurement Issues
Theoretically the only advantage of following a centralized approach in NHS project can be the procurement. It was estimated 4.5 billion pounds were saved in terms of prices for goods and services from these suppliers. However the haste resulted in a product which doesn’t fulfill the goals as pointed out by the chairman of Clinical Care Advisory Group, Professor Hutton, but instead of acting on his advice he was asked to consider which lead to his
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