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Greater use of information technology is key to reforming the NHS. The trouble is, government IT projects tend to go wrong
AS CIVIL servants go, Richard Granger, who has just taken up his post as the new information-technology (IT) chief of the National Health Service, is well-paid. With an annual salary of pounds 250,000 ($390,000), he earns more than Nigel Crisp, the chief executive of the NHS; more than Alan Milburn, the health secretary; more, even, than Tony Blair.
That gives some idea of the importance, and difficulty, of Mr Granger's new job. It is arguably the world's largest single IT project, with a proposed budget of pounds 12 billion over the next five years (from barely pounds 1 billion this year). But a big revamp is generally agreed to be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for delivering improvements across the NHS as a whole. The Wanless report earlier this year concluded that spending on technology had to double at once if the NHS was to reach its targets; the NHS spends less on IT per employee than any other industry sector.
Under plans outlined earlier this year at a Downing Street seminar, widening the NHS's sclerotic information arteries could make it more responsive in three areas in particular, by doing away with paperwork. (Paper forms, brown envelopes and even carbon paper are still the way most data get around.) Online booking of hospital appointments would allow patients to choose convenient times and reschedule if they were unable to attend. Electronic transmission of prescriptions from doctors to pharmacists would do away with errors caused by spidery handwriting, and cut costs by recommending generic drugs automatically. And the digitisation of patient records would make it easier for hospitals and local doctors to exchange information. A Londoner taken ill in Liverpool, for example, could have his details beamed across the country.
It all sounds great. But the government has staked its credibility on delivering clear improvements to public services, so Mr Granger has been asked to start implementing these three programmes starting next April, after just a few months of planning, with a target of 50% coverage by December 2005. Such a tight...