News / Seven-month deadline for IT

The national programme for IT (NPFIT) in England has been given seven months to show major progress in implementing electronic patient records.

Setting out a strategy for accelerating the pace of delivery of the IT programme, the Department of Health’s director general for informatics Christine Connelly said additional suppliers would be attracted into the market and the Department would allow new products to be developed locally.

Hospital trusts in the south of England that are not supplied by BT will have a new procurement process – a year ago local service provider Fujitsu dropped out of the programme.

She added the department would produce a toolkit by March 2010 that would allow new products to be developed locally, accredited centrally and then linked to existing information systems.

Ms Connelly has been reviewing NPFIT since she was appointed last summer and confirmed the programme’s aims of providing accessible and timely information as well as supporting patient care should be retained. She also backed the procurement model, which pays suppliers only when they deliver working systems.

While progress had been made in areas such as digitised imaging, online patient referrals, and a broadband network linking acute hospitals, GP surgeries and community services, the implementation of electronic information systems in the acute sector had proved challenging.

She called for an injection of pace in this area and set a deadline for progress.

‘We will work closely with the NHS and our current suppliers to improve the pace of delivery. If we don’t see significant progress by the end of November 2009, we will move to a new plan for delivering informatics to healthcare. The potential for informatics to improve the quality of services for patients is enormous, and I want to ensure that what we are doing is in the best interests of patients, as well as the system,’ she added.