A Really Worthwhile Look Back At The UK NHS Program for Health IT. It Started A Decade Plus Story That Needs To Be Told!

The following pair of very useful articles appeared a little while ago.

Horrible history part one: here comes the 21st century

Ten years ago, the document that led to the creation of the National Programme for IT in the NHS was launched. Lyn Whitfield re-visits ‘Delivering 21st century IT’.

11 June 2012

It is June and the government has set out a ten-year “vision” for information in the NHS. As the result of a new strategy, the patients of the future will “see that their health records are always available to staff” and be able to “help to maintain the quality of those records” by getting access to them.

The time that healthcare staff spend with patients will be “spent more effectively” because of the information at their fingertips. Data will also be opened up to healthcare managers and researchers and to new services such as telemedicine, which will become “commonplace.”

Of course, it is not June 2012 and the strategy is not ‘The Power of Information: putting us all in control of the health and care information we need.’ Instead, it is June 2002, and the strategy is ‘Delivering 21st century IT support for the NHS:  national strategic programme.’

Ruthless standardisation

‘Delivering 21st century IT’ is the document that paved the way for the National Programme for IT in the NHS. Its big innovation was not its vision – which it shared with earlier NHS IT strategies, as well as later ones – but the mechanisms it put in place for delivering that vision.

As it said upfront in its opening paragraphs: “The core of our strategy is to take greater control over the specification, procurement, resource management, performance management and delivery of the information and IT agenda.

“We will improve the leadership and direction given to IT and combine it with national and local implementation based on ruthless standardisation.”

Specifically, a ministerial taskforce was to be established under the chairmanship of Lord Hunt, a former head of the NHS Confederation, who had been made a Labour peer after the 1997 general election and was health minister in the Lords.

A new NHS IT programme director was to be appointed to lead on what Lord Hunt himself described as “the IT challenge of the decade.”

Standards for data and data interchange and system specifications for a new, National Health Record Service were to be set at a national level. And there was to be a big shake-up of procurement arrangements, with “consortia of suppliers” bidding for the work.

Finally, strategic health authorities were to appoint chief information officers to make sure that primary care trusts and providers “implement and use the core IT solutions determined at a national level.”

A product of its time

‘Delivering 21st century IT’ did not come out of nowhere. In 1998, the NHS had published ‘Information for Health’, a well-received strategy written by NHS IT pioneer Frank Burns, that proposed a rather different set of delivery mechanisms.

An NHS Information Authority was set up to create a national IT infrastructure, to run electronic patient record ‘beacon’ projects, to set standards for increasingly sophisticated ‘levels’ of EPR functionality, and to measure progress against targets for deploying that functionality to hospitals.

However, it left trusts to procure their own systems to meet these targets. And by the start of 2002 it was obvious that they were going to be missed.

IfH’s failure was blamed on technical issues, on trusts spending money that was supposedly ring-fenced for IT on other pressures, including a fledgling reform programme, and on the sheer difficulty of procuring systems from a “cottage industry” of suppliers.

But while the strategy had faltered, the pressure on the NHS to make better use of IT had grown. IfH was launched against a background of Tory “cuts” in the health service and Labour promises to restrain growth during its first term in office.

The strategy itself was to be funded from a £5 billion modernisation fund that had other calls upon it.

Yet in January 2000, Prime Minister Tony Blair was bounced into promising a massive increase in NHS funding in response to media stories about the NHS failing to cope with winter pressures.

The Department of Health quickly insisted that more money would have to be accompanied by ‘reform’ and launched The NHS Plan.

This included some ideas for getting the NHS to adopt the kind of consumer-facing technology that had been adopted by other industries – such as ‘airline-style booking.’

Meanwhile, a furious Treasury had asked a former banker, Derek Wanless, to investigate the demands that the health service would need to make on it in the future.

At the start of 2002, Wanless (who died recently) reported that if spending was going to be kept under control, the population would need to become healthier and the NHS would need to become more efficient.

He saw a big uptick in IT adoption as part of the second half of the equation, and proposed that NHS spending on IT should rise to £2.7 billion a year over a three-year period to deliver big gains in productivity.

The final part of the jigsaw was that Downing Street was keen on NHS IT, thanks to a seminar at Downing Street at which Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates, in the UK to promote Windows XP, persuaded Blair and his advisors of replacing a local approach to NHS IT with a national one.

The rest of the beginning story is found here:

http://www.ehi.co.uk/insight/analysis/905/horrible-history:-here-comes-the-21st-century

And for the part two we continue here:

Horrible history part two: things fall apart

The National Programme for IT in the NHS got off to a flying start; but soon started to go off-track. Lyn Whitfield looks back.

13 June 2012

Lots omitted as the rush to disaster seemed to accelerate.

......

So good they abolished it twice

As the programme struggled, the Department of Health’s commitment to its approach declined. In 2006, in a neatly Orwellian touch, it announced a ‘national local ownership programme’ to give SHAs much more responsibility for shaping and delivering NHS IT requirements.

Then, after Richard Granger completed an extended “transition” out of his post in 2008, Matthew Swindells, the chief executive of Royal County Hospital NHS Trust and a ministerial advisor, was brought in to carry out a review.

This urged trusts to focus on creating a “tipping point” in demand for strategic IT systems, by focusing on what became known as the Clinical 5 - a patient administration system, order comms, discharge letters, scheduling and e-prescribing.

Christine Connelly, who succeeded Swindells as the NHS chief information officer, went further. She talked about recasting the national elements of the programme and creating an “app store” for the NHS (which became the interoperability toolkit).

She promised a new “connect all” approach, in which there would be more choice for trusts and “multiple systems in different places” as a result of that choice. And at the end of its term in government, Labour lopped £500m off the nominal cost of the programme.

Despite this, it remained an irresistible target for media pundits and politicians. In opposition, Prime Minister David Cameron the project the “NHS supercomputer”; in government, his health ministers abolished it not once but twice.

In September 2010, Simon Burns announced that £700m would be cut from NPfIT, that the oversight of national projects would move from CfH to “new arrangements” by 2012, and that trusts would be allowed to choose from “a more plural system of IT and other suppliers.”

A year later, following a scathing report from the National Audit Office, and an even more scathing investigation by the Commons’ health select committee into what the programme had delivered by way of health records and into what the NHS had paid for them, Burns did the same again.

The zombie NPfIT

Yet, as EHI editor Jon Hoeksma noted at the time, NPfIT continues to have a kind of zombie existence. After more than 18 months of drafting, ‘The Power of Information’ failed to explain what will happen to CfH, or will be responsible for infrastructure, standards and national projects in the future.

CSC has been locked in negotiations over a new LSP deal for the NME for 18 months. A deal that would have delivered what the government called “savings” of £1 billion on its £3 billion contract looked close this spring. But a ‘standstill agreement’ between CSC and the DH was recently extended to 31 August.

Trusts in the South that were not covered by the BT deal were promised a systems procurement using the Additional Supply Capability and Capacity framework. But this collapsed at the end of December 2011, after almost two years of effort.

These trusts have yet to hear whether an alternative way to deliver national support and funding will be found. But then, amazingly, the £700m of legal action triggered by Fujitsu’s departure has yet to be resolved.

And, of course, the vision of ‘Delivering 21st century IT’ has not been delivered. The patient experience of the NHS has not been transformed by technology, health staff continue to lack universal access to sophisticated health records, data for commissioning and research remains hard to gather and analyse.

‘The Power of Information’ did not make the mistake that ‘Delivering 21st century IT’ made of drawing up a national plan to try and impose its vision on local NHS organisations.

On the other hand, it said virtually nothing about how its remarkably similar ten year vision for NHS IT would be achieved. So the question may be: will no plan succeed where the ‘national strategic programme’ didn’t get results?

Full article here:

http://www.ehi.co.uk/insight/analysis/906/horrible-history-part-two:-things-fall-apart

This really makes just riveting reading as you see 10 years pass over just a few minutes.

The strategic instability, the lack of clinician engagement and so on are all there and most worrying is the length of time the programme has persisted after so many attempts to kill it off and maybe start again.
The parallels to what is presently happening in Australia are all too obvious.
All in all - compulsory reading.

David.