March 1 2005 02:00
An important part of the National Health Service's information technology programme has slipped by six to nine months.
The delay, which will hit more than 100 hospitals and thousands of doctors' practices, is because IDX, the software developer, decided more testing time was needed before elements of the programme, that allow an electronic patient record to be built, were introduced.
It follows slower than planned progress on "choose and book" - the system that allows online booking of hospital outpatient appointments, which is now likely to cover only 60 to 70 per cent of England by the end of the year rather than all of it. The NHS's programme for IT has confirmed delays in introducing elements of the care record in the two regions where IDX is responsible. These are London and the south. The delay will affect about 40 per cent of the population.
The programme, which has been criticised both within the NHS and by the National Audit Office for failing to engage doctors and nurses sufficiently, underlined that IDX had taken its decision "following consultation with clinicians" that identified the need for more testing time.
The programme stressed that other work would continue, with software ready to support "choose and book", electronic transmission of prescriptions and the transfer of records between GPs.
In addition, new GP systems and hospital patient administration systems would continue to be installed. The delay is understood to affect elements that allow the summary care record to be built up - the stage at which the programme starts to become clinically useful.
Those elements may now be delayed from the autumn until late spring 2006, the programme said, although leaked NHS communications seen by E-Health Insider, the online newsletter that monitors the programme and first highlighted the delay, show some NHS managers now believe it will be delivered in June next year "at the earliest".
The programme said the other regions should not be affected, but the delay underlines the difficulty of delivering the £6.2bn venture to highly ambitious timescales. The NAO reported in January that only 63 appointments had gone through "choose and book" pilots by the end of last year against the 205,000 planned and that the upgrading of hospital systems that could not cope with the technology was behind schedule.
The programme has, however, had some marked successes, including installing to time and budget a programme to underpin the new family doctors' contract.
Yesterday the programme announced that electronic transmission of prescriptions had started in the first of the "early implementer" sites.
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