NHS IT loses key contractor
Fujitsu says goodbye
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The NHS patient care record project has suffered another serious setback - key contractor Fujitsu is ending any involvement in the scheme.
The National Programme for IT, NPfIT, is already four years late and over budget and losing Fujitsu is unlikely to help. Estimated costs for the whole project have risen to £12.7bn. Fujitsu was running the patient records scheme in southern England.
Fujitsu told us: "Fujitsu Services can confirm that we have now taken the decision to withdraw from the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) contract re-set negotiations with NHS Connecting for Health as we did not feel there was a prospect of an acceptable conclusion. Our contract with the NHS will therefore end early."
It is understood that Fujitsu wanted to return to the original contract while Connecting for Health wanted to renegotiate.
A spokeswoman for the NHS's Connecting for Health said: "Regrettably and despite best efforts by all parties, it has not been possible to reach an agreement on the core Fujitsu contract that is acceptable to all parties. The NHS will therefore end the contract early by issuing a termination notice.
"Work has started immediately on planning the necessary arrangements.".
It is possible the two sides could end up in court over the issue.
The ten-year contract was worth £895m to Fujitsu but finding a replacement provider won't be easy - in 2006 consultancy Accenture pulled out of NPfIT and handed £2bn of contracts to CSC.
The only other option will be to give the work to BT, but it is hard to negotiate effectively when you only have one possible supplier.
The north of England and the Midlands are awaiting arrival of untested software, called Lorenzo, from iSoft. Lorenzo is due to begin testing later this summer.
The National Programme for IT lost two senior figures at the end of last year - director general Richard Granger and interim CIO Mathew Swindells. They are still to be replaced. ®
COMMENTS
It is/was bloody awful software anyhow
The product they were hawking is win95 code, adapted (badly) from the american market and the list of modules and functions that simply do not function is immense.
of course we, the NHS, wanted them fixed according to the specification -however Fujitsu wanted major cash to do this.
Simple reason -they did not author the software, maintain it or correct it -Cerner do, They have no contact with the NHS at all -so Fujitsu have to pay them to do it and of course according to NPfIT rules, the main contractor does not get paid until the damn thing works.
So they dumped us, Ba$t@rds
Its only complex if
you try and integrate it with all the propriatry stuff that all the is already there. If you try and do that then I'm afraid £12.7 billion won't do it. In fact I can't imagine it being possible as each interface will have to be reworked or a translation package written and maintained. All that is required ( as others have said) is something to ship the info to the right people and there are so many simple ways of doing that which work. So which do you go for. The impossible or the achievable? Hmm, tough choice huh?
@ Anonymous coward, I have worked on large scale projects and integration stuff. If the scope of the project is spec'ed as " We want it all and we want it now", its always doomed to failure. Occams razor and the old KISS ( keep it simple stupid) never let you down. My experience of NHS IT projects are all of disjointed, over ambitious projects that normally end up expensive and unused.
Personal Opt-Out
For those who might themselves want to opt out of the NHS database scheme and haven't yet done so, the Federation for Internet Policy Research and NO2ID notes and details of their standard letter can be found here:
http://www.nhsconfidentiality.org/?page_id=23
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