Doctors slam Choose and Book
Choose and Book unfit for purpose
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The British Medical Association said today the NHS's Choose and Book system is unfit for purpose and actually limits choice for patients.
Doctors at the BMA's annual general meeting voted for an investigation into the impact Choose and Book was having on referrals. The system is part of the National Programme for IT and, in theory, should allow doctors to quickly and electronically book patient appointments with specialists. BMA members described the system as politically motivated and designed to help meet targets.
But doctors held back from calling for a suspension of the controversial system.
One consultant told the conference that he rejects about half of Choose and Book appointments because they do not match his skills or are for patients already being cared for by colleagues.
But other attendees blamed the way Primary Care Trusts implement Choose and Book for the problems, not the system itself.
The BMA's acting chairman, Sam Everington, said: “What a sorry state the NHS IT system is in. Estimated costs of upward of £20bn, interminable delays, the chaotic shambles that is Choose and Book, growing concerns about patient confidentiality and security – it’s a wonderful exercise in how not to do things. Little wonder then that even Richard Granger has decided it is time he left the IT sinking ship!”, according to Computer Weekly.
More from Computer Weekly here, and from E-Health Insider here.
COMMENTS
Excuses?
What do you expect when you have too much manpower thrown at a project where time scales are simply stupid, budgets ridiculous, along with project managers (inexperienced?!), permanent staff and contractors who don’t, can’t or won’t talk to each other. When a problem crops up, everyone blames someone/anyone else or, the best one, blames the lack of communications between groups – and everyone ends up going round in ever decreasing circles.
Then when the project is completed and most, if not all, of the programmers/developers have moved on (lucky them) to other projects there is no one left who knows the system(s) to support it/them and so the support staff, who may not have a clue anyway, end up ‘fire fighting’ and trying to pass the buck in an attempt to buy some time.
Oh what a wonderful world we live in!
Phil A
"Hmm, if hotels and airlines have been managing to book online for many years now and interoperate between disparate systems, it shouldn't be so hard so yep, about a million quid sounds reasonable."
Hahahaha - very amusing. The Global Distribution Systems may be archaic old green-screen dinosaurs, with a web gloss over the top, but they're far from simple. If you can build a system that does what SABRE, Amadeus, or even Expedia does for a million quid, forget the NHS, you'll make a fortune in the travel industry. Even bolting together an aggregation site to let you choose prices among e.g. low-cost carriers is not trivial.
NHS Outsourced IT companies are pathetic
Glen Williams : "...shoddy VB 4 App with an Access backend database... "
Gosh, that sounds amazingly familiar!!!!!
...and we won't even mention the security issues related to said crappy DB, or the web-based rubbish in use because so-called "developers" these days can only bodge together microsoft-related rubbish, instead of proper applications.
Having said that, these rubbish systems are what is being addressed (kinda sort-of) by EPR, etc...
"...or the famous "it's a local networking issue"..."
Gee, you got that one, too? Who would have guessed...
We had one where they'd sent a whle team over from america and their rubbish bit of web-based software didn't work and they spent 3 days pestering me about it - turned out they'd forgotten the time zones (duh) and somebody at the other end was switching it off (or something) just as the "team" in the UK was trying to use it.
But do you think it occurred to them to look into the problem themselves - quick phonecall to sort out the problem?
Nah, blame the NHS workers and say "it's a local networking issue".....
What got me though, is the very next time they had problems, it'd be straight to "it's a local networking issue" again without learning from their previous experiences.
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