An upgrade was desperately needed to improve customer care and to interconnect departments across the UK. It failed.
The National Health Service in the United Kingdom is a mammoth enterprise in regards to employees and patients, and keeping track of all those medical records needs a system second to none. The current method of storing and sharing information countrywide was considered to be cumbersome, and outdated, with a mix of physical paperwork and computer record storage that contributed negatively to slowing down the whole system.
Naturally, this affected the quality and speed of service to patients that, across cities, was a constant administrative nightmare.
The government concluded that this situation was simply untenable in the long term. A solution had to be found urgently before the whole of the NHS became a quagmire of red tape, overworked staff, and even longer cues of frustrated patients.
A countrywide computerized system for the NHS was considered to be the answer to their prayers. But, as with most governmental projects of this scale, it wasn’t going to be cheap.
In 2002, the solution was realized and a replacement for the National Program for IT was launched with the aim of completely overhauling the technological aspects of the organization and revolutionizing the way patients’ records were stored, accessed, and shared. The budget was set at a mere £6.4 billion.
Four Local Service Providers were contracted to collaborate and execute the program across five segmented zones called clusters. These were the South of England, London, East & West Midlands, North West and West Midlands, and the North East of England, with such software companies as Fujitsu and Accenture.
This structure alleviated the pressure of the whole program being dependent on one IT company, and also mitigated the risk for the government. Unfortunately, the problem was not ultimately with any of the companies, but with the government itself, and cries of corruption were soon to be echoing down shadowy hallways.
Mismanagement reared its ugly head fairly early on which saw deadlines being missed by some of the companies, technical problems abounding, and colossal miscommunications from the top down and across contractors and subcontractors. And the problems simply continued to mount from there in too many sectors.
In July 2007, Accenture bowed out of the project, partly due to the failure of a company called iSoft to deliver vital software, but possibly a contributing factor was the previous years of adjustments and governmental intervention that was a constant thorn in their side, and then in 2008 Fujitsu’s contract was terminated.
The software giant didn’t take their termination lying down, however, and sued the Department for Health for unfair dismissal. Court costs alone amounted to £31.5 million, which the taxpayer had to pay, and when Fujitsu won the case in arbitration, more public money was paid up to the tune of £700 million.
Contractual disputes, more delays, technical difficulties, and rising costs saw the budget soar from the initial £6.4 billion to £10 billion in a very short space of time.
Controversy also arose around data protection, with even some medical practitioners saying they would never have their own personal details on the system due to data security concerns. Faith across the board was beginning to suffer.
And then in 2008, the budget ran dry, with not a penny left in the kitty.
Somehow, that same year, a few more billion was sourced, to raise the total spend to £12.7bn, yet even those extra funds couldn’t stop the ambitious program from being scrapped in the end. Fingers were pointed, accounting irregularities were found, and criticisms were aimed at ministers who were all gung-ho for the program initially, but had little to no idea on how to deliver on the ambitious initiatives of the project.
A simple oversight on their part with this multi-billion-pound white elephant was that technology was moving far faster than work was progressing, so by the time the software had been installed and tested, it was already becoming obsolete.
Undoubtedly, the project was an abject failure, and it was fairly universally acknowledged that the money wasted would have been better spent on nurses’ salaries, attracting more employees, and improving patient care, rather than on big tech companies and on financing whoever else was responsible for managing the critically panned National Health Service IT system than never was.
To this day the system was only partially used for some NHS trusts and has never been utilized to its full intended potential. In the end, it can only be classified as a dismal failure and a colossal waste of £12 billion.