A Billion Dollars Here, A Billion Pounds There

Canada isn't the only jurisdiction wrestling with billion dollar e-health boondoggles as it turns out.

Only 175 people using flagship NHS software, says minister

Lorenzo care records system is likely to be costing taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds per user per year

Recent news from the UK has identified that very few people are actually using one of the only two systems being brought in by the government to manage patient information.

There are only 174 clinicians using Lorenzo patient software across the five early adopter trusts, according to Mike O'Brien, minister for the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

Five Boroughs Partnership, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay, Hereford Hospitals and South Birmingham have only ever had 19 clinicians using the systems at the same time.

Lorenzo is one of two software packages being used to set up centralised electronic health records as part of the £12.7bn National Programme for IT. This part of the programme is already running four years late.

Lorenzo is being supplied by services company CSC to trusts in the north of England and by its developer iSoft directly to trusts in the south after Fujitsu was fired from the programme.

The other patient software package is Cerner Millennium, being supplied by BT in London and a handful of trusts in the south.

The information came from a parliamentary question tabled by Richard Bacon MP.

Last week in the Commons he said:

"I tabled a question yesterday about the number of hospital trusts where Lorenzo has been partially deployed, asking how many users — how many concurrent users — of Lorenzo there are.

"It is literally just a handful, which means that the cost per user is not what one would expect… the cost is going to be many hundreds of thousands — possibly even more than a million — pounds per user per year."

£1,000,000 per user, per year. (That's about $1.75 million dollars in Canada. Per user, per year.)

I guess they haven't heard of OSCAR.

Saving Healthcare From Demographic Demise

Harvard has posted a total package of information from the 2009 HIT Platform meeting.

We discussed this meeting in a prior post, and if you want a quick summary, this is a good place to start.

There are two major components of information available on Harvard's ITdotHealth website:

1.       the detailed meeting summary

http://www.itdothealth.org/wp-content/themes/atahualpa/images/header/HMS-HIT-Platform-final-v110909.pdf

2.       and presentation videos and photos

 http://www.itdothealth.org/multimedia/2009-hit-platform/#videos

If you only have time and space in your mind for one thing from this conference, please spend it on the keynote presentation from Clayton Christensen. In his keynote, he clearly articulates in very simple terms how healthcare will need to change in order to avoid complete financial disaster in the future.

Of Standards and Certifications

Much discussion is going on in the web-o-sphere these days about Health Canada's recent decision regarding the classification of EMR products as a Class II Medical Device.

Working within the regulatory frameworks of various jurisdictions are a normal way of life for many software applications, and OSCAR continues to meet and exceed these regulations on a regular basis.

Because of OSCAR's unique role in numerous social communities and academic organizations, the platform has always been at the forefront of technology, capability, privacy, and regulation.

In many cases, OSCAR leads the industry in terms of practice management. For example, OSCAR's efforts concerning security and privacy enhancing technology, especially as it pertains to delivering control and consent to clients over their own medical information, continuously shines as an example for others to follow.

It is no surprise then, that the OSCAR community continues to invest to achieve all relevant certifications for all jurisdictions that the software is deployed.