Devolution the answer to NHS IT records problem?

silicon.com reports that Christine Connelly, the Department of Health (DoH) director general for informatics, has told current suppliers BT and CSC that they must speed up the roll out of key systems for the national medical records database by November this year.

Last year, a third supplier, Fujitsu gave up its contract. BT has taken over the work it had started for some trusts, but Ms Connelly gave hope to others that have been waiting for new patient administration systems (PAS) due to be provided by Fujitsu.

She said that these trusts would now be able to be able to get central funding to choose new suppliers to provide PAS, from an approved DoH list.

The records system is about four years behind schedule. To this observer, it seems that too much of the detailed design was centralised and this has caused many of the difficulties.