NHS IT under a Conservative Government

(By Richard Holway 8.00am Monday 10th Aug 09) Much talk yesterday about the fate of the NHS IT programme under an incoming Conservative Government. To be blunt there is nothing really new here – we’ve reported before on the Tories plan to abandon the central patient record systems in favour of local systems, where GPs and “local trusts should be able to choose their computer system from a catalogue of agreed providers rather than having it imposed on them” backed up by the option for patients to use something like Microsoft or Google to store their own record.

The independent review commissioned by shadow health minister Stephen O'Brien is due to be published today. The BBC – See NHS IT needs overhaul – suggests ”Contracts in place with IT service providers - two out of four of whom have already pulled out of the project - should be brought to a halt and renegotiated to "prevent further inefficiencies””. As we have said before, this could create a legal nightmare as the compensation payments could be huge.