We’ve blogged before about the NHS’s computer project. So I’m not at all happy about this remarkably silly post at Timmeh’s. He takes issue with a post of Richard Murphy’s about bank nationalisation:
Yup, the people who brought you the NHS Spine are to be put in charge of developing all banking software in Britain.
Well, this is a strawman to begin with. Is Murphy the Chancellor now? But let that pass. Really? A group of mostly American healthcare computing specialists? Several of which no longer exist? Or does he mean the big IT consulting firms involved – like IBM, BT Global Services, and Accenture? Because I’m pretty sure they do a hell of a lot of financial work as it stands; in fact, everyone was worrying last week about IBM’s third quarter results precisely because banks are big customers. (They turned out to be OK, in that mysterious IBM way.*)
But perhaps he thinks the NHS NPfIT was developed by teh government bureaucrats? Or at least, he’s willing to pretend it was to suit ideology? The whole problem with NPfIT, as we’ve said before, is that the system was developed completely in isolation from NHS bureaucrats or indeed anyone else who would have to use it. The NHS trust IT departments were kept well out of it. The upshot was that the developers knew literally nothing of the NHS’s requirements, its business processes, or the data the system was meant to handle.
No wonder it was a disaster. In fact, when a group of US hospital bureaucrats had a go at designing a medical IT system, they came up with a beauty – there’s even a satisfied customer in the comments. Why? Because they knew what it was meant to do and how. Compare this comment:
I met a guy who works for this company. I cannot repeat what he said, since he has a family to feed. But suffice to say he was deeply worried about the implications for safety of life. That was a few months ago.
The whole thing is rotten to the core, and desperately needs to be scrapped. Now.
The good news is that the thing still doesn’t work well enough to turn it on even as a pilot project, so we’re safe for a while yet. But what did happen the last time the Government took on a really challenging in-house IT project? You ask Daniel Davies.
(* probably something to do with asking the fucking users – that or the staple Nazi market, or wearing a lot of pale blue shirts.)