Data Sharing Review

[Mary Hawking]

Adrian Midgley wrote:
>Michael Simpson wrote:
>
>> The mistakes that are being made right now due to still being on paper
>> records and a total lack of joined up thinking between primary and
>> secondary care need to be stopped by designing systems to take over
>> the whole process.
>
>I don't think that approach, which is the approach that was applied by 
>Acenture (withdrawn from contract) and Fujitsu (jumped or pushed?) and 
>CSC (not a lot of progress visible from here, yet), is the only, or the 
>best, or the most reliable, or the most secure one.
>
>It owes more to the attempt to corner a market than to engieering 
>workable systems.

I'd agree with that - but we have the results of the contracts still in 
the old Accenture clusters - North East and East.
CSC/TPP SystmOne was designed to be an all-inclusive GP/Community system 
- and is being rolled out aggressively in these areas.
There are genuine difficulties with managing a shared record (see my 
presentation at the PHCSG Summer Conference - www.phcsg.org.uk - 15.20 
day 1 stream 2) which may well prove insurmountable - and adding 
secondary care would make it much, much worse!

I don't think the problem lies with attempts by the LSPs to corner the 
market: their contracts specify the monopoly.
The fault lies with the design of the contracts in the first place - 
they specify a single system in the case of Accenture (not Fujitsu - 
seems they had no contract for GP systems - same as CSC in the North 
West) - and the centralisation and selling off of *all* NHS IT by a 
government and the programme's appointed SRO who obviously had no clue 
about what they were doing, the implications and the mess they were 
likely to get into by this commercial take-over approach!
</rant>

Sorry.
Michael, there are times when I wish I lived north of the border!

Mary Hawking


-- 
Mary Hawking