UK's electronic health record biggest IT disaster ever?

[rnformatics]

There's another healthcare related article over at Slashdot. In this article, they're discussing the problems that the UK has had with the implementation of their National Programme for IT:

"Baseline has a major story about a major IT disaster in the UK: 'In 2002, the English government embarked on a $12 billion effort to transform its health-care system with information technology. But the country's oversight agency now puts that figure at $24 billion, and two Members of Parliament say the project is "sleepwalking toward disaster"... In scale, the project... (NPfIT) is overwhelming. Initiated in 2002, the NPfIT is a 10-year project to build new computer systems that would connect more than 100,000 doctors, 380,000 nurses and 50,000 other health-care professionals; allow for the electronic storage and retrieval of patient medical records; permit patients to set up appointments via their computers; and let doctors electronically transmit prescriptions to local pharmacies.'"

For those that aren't familiar with the NPfIT:

Originally Posted by from Wikipedia

The National Programme for IT (NPfIT) which is being delivered by the new Department of Health agency NHS Connecting for Health, is an initiative by the National Health Service in England to move towards an electronic care record for patients and to connect 30,000 GPs to 300 hospitals, providing secure and audited access to these records by authorised health professionals. In due course it is planned that patients will also have access to their records online through a service called HealthSpace. NPfIT is said to be the world's biggest civil information technology programme.

Read the full NPfIT discussion at Slashdot