Saving of £700m as NHS technology scheme cut back

The controversial information technology upgrade of the NHS is being scaled back to save £700m under plans announced by the Government.

The cut comes on top of 600 m of savings announced under Labour, meaning the overall cost for the National Programme for IT for England will drop from 12.7bn to 11.4bn.

Major parts of the system are already in place, but in future hospitals will be able to decide locally the types of upgrade they need rather than being forced to adopt an entirely new system.

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Choose and Book, which allows GPs to book hospital appointments while their patients are in the surgery, is already in place, as is the system for electronic prescriptions, which allows drug orders to be sent directly to the pharmacy for patients to pick up.

A new digital picture archiving system is also running, allowing X-rays and other images to be viewed online and sent from one hospital to another.

The Summary Care Record, which has attracted intense criticism, is under review, with a report due later this month.

The record is designed to put every patient’s medical notes online, allowing them to be treated anywhere, including in an emergency.

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Opponents say not enough has been done to ensure patients understand the type of information that will be uploaded about them, and there have been fears over breaches of security.

Letters informing patients their records are going online have been halted while the review concludes, although some GPs are still uploading records for which they have consent from their patients.

Some 2.7 million online records have been created so far.

In a statement yesterday, the Government said all existing contracts for parts of the IT programme will still be honoured.

Health Minister Simon Burns said: “Improving IT is essential to delivering a patient-centred NHS. But the nationally-imposed system is neither necessary nor appropriate to deliver this. We will allow hospitals to use and develop the IT they already have and add to their environment either by integrating systems purchased through the existing national contracts or elsewhere. Moving IT systems closer to the frontline will release 700m extra in savings.

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“Every penny saved through productivity gains will be reinvested to improve patient care.”

Director general for informatics, Christine Connelly, said: “It is clear that the National Programme for IT has delivered important changes for the NHS, including an infrastructure which the NHS today depends on for providing safe and responsive health care.

“Now the NHS is changing, we need to change the way IT supports those changes, bringing decisions closer to the front line and ensuring that change is manageable and holds less risk for NHS organisations.”

Professor Iain Carpenter, co -director of the Royal College of Physicians Health Informatics Unit, said: “Taking the decision to align IT systems more closely with the needs of the frontline is a good idea in theory.

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“The real challenge though will rest in making sure that we get the right health informatics structures in place.

“One of the dirty secrets of the NHS is the regrettable state of medical record keeping.

“Earlier reports have shown that this compromises patient safety and clinical care.”