Speaking at a joint session of GC Expo, Smart Healthcare and Procurement Solutions on 12 June, 2007, Connecting for Health chief executive Richard Granger gave delegates an update on what has so far been achieved in terms of core system delivery.
He was backed up by one of the programme's contractors, managing director of BT Health Patrick O'Connell, who said the NHS's National Programme for IT was working and it was a question of gathering pace.
Granger responded to a call from Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat shadow health spokesperson, for the government to undertake an independent review of the programme and suspend work on the national records system. He described this as being as controversial as the programme itself and produced a barrage of statistics to support his claim that it is producing results.
He said that stopping a system that was enabling patients, among other things, to make 18,500 "Choose and Book" electronic appointment bookings every day was "probably not the sort of idea that you would be able to exercise without causing massive disruption".
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He cited the Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) as a "very significant success" of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in bringing about efficiency gains. "We've implemented [PACS in]138 sites now in the NHS," said Granger, who added that it would be up and running in all of the country by the end of the financial year.
The N3 broadband network has been delivered ahead of schedule, Granger said. He outlined plans for the network's development over the next year, including voice over IP, wireless voice over IP, the introduction of wearable phones for frontline clinicians in the acute sector, and measures to converge GSM and wireless local area networks for voice communications.
Admitting that there was still a lot of work to do, Granger said that system delivery of the GP2GP project, which is enabling patients' electronic health records to be transferred directly from one practice to another, was just eight percent complete. He put this down to interoperability difficulties between competing vendors. He also conceded that brownfield sites, of which only about 10 percent were complete under the NPfIT, would continue to cause difficulties.
