According to a report in The Financial Times the National Health Service and its suppliers are struggling to get in place the basic building blocks for the planned national electronic patient record.
The FT reports that The NHS financial deficit from last year and a shortage of resources to train staff appear to be compounding problems linking old systems with the new ones, as well as difficulties in migrating old data to the new systems.
Some NHS trusts have apparently put off taking patient administration systems to wait for new versions of the software, while others are demanding more customization of the system than suppliers originally envisaged.
Figures quoted by the FT as having been released by Connecting for Health, the NHS IT programme, show that of 87 planned deployments of patient administration and other systems between the end of June and the end of October, only 56 have taken place.
These allegedly include smaller systems, such as picture archiving to replace x-ray film with digital images. But installations of the basic building blocks for the electronic record - new patient administration systems - continue to run late. Of 43 patient administration systems that the IT programme said should be in place by the end of November, only about 19 have been installed.
Earlier this year one of the leading suppliers is quoted to have said privately that installing the systems should be "like shelling peas" once the first few had gone in. But comments by suppliers and Connecting for Health on the reasons for the continued delays point to a host of problems.
The problems quoted by the FT include the failure of some trusts to put aside enough money and resources for staff training; the reluctance of some staff to follow procedures with the new systems; extended testing periods when old systems are found to have duplicate records for many patients; and complications when other hospital systems have to be plugged into new ones.
