Thursday, November 12, 2009

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.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just stumbled across Oscar EMR - trying to figure out if I can make it work for me (I'm a chiropractor in Halifax - musculoskeletal and rehab practice)

Where can I ask questions? Are there any PT's or orthopod's using the system?

Hoping, at long last, to find a system that lets me easily enter the data I want, track it, and secure it - ideally using a tablet PC

Thanks for the info,
Mark Bodnar
Drbodnar@accesswave.ca

Anonymous said...

There are PTs that use OSCAR.

You can send your questions directly to me at david@indivica.com if you would like to discuss your particular situation.

-David