UK's National Programme for IT in the NHS Known Doomed at Outset?

It would seem likely.

In May 2009 at "The Machinery Behind Healthcare Reform: How the HIT Lobby is Pushing Experimental and Unsafe Technology on Unconsented Patients and Clinicians" I wrote:

... I can add that if this initiative [the U.S. multibillion dollar ARRA push towards national healthcare IT by 2014] blows up as it has in the UK, then the only triumph will be the financial triumph of the trade group and its apparatchiks. The losers will be the administration, patients, clinicians, and everyone else in the healthcare system.

The UK situation is much worse than I thought. The UK's NPfIT in the NHS was suspected to have been doomed from the start, but proceeded anyway; see "16 key points in Gateway Reviews on NHS IT scheme" and the secretive Gateway Reviews themselves upon which the preceding article was based, released under UK Freedom Of Information laws. From ComputerWeekly.com author Tony Collins on Gateway Reviews:

... Gateway reviews are mini-audits at critical stages in projects. The reports in question gave a red, amber or green status at each stage to help the project’s senior responsible owner decide whether to move to the next phase.

The government’s policy on Gateway reviews is to keep them confidential. All copies of a review are shredded, with the supporting material, to ensure only two reports remain – one for the Treasury’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and the other for the project’s senior responsible owner.

Highlights of the secretive health IT program reviews, now made public:

• the NPfIT was probably doomed from the start, in Spring 2002. As one Gateway Review put it, many dedicated people were working hard on building the components for a car that hadn't been designed. To some extent that's still true today.

• people didn't really know what they were doing in the first critical months in 2002

• the initial plan was for new IT - not for changes to the way people work. So the preoccupation was with IT and not patients. It was hoped that new IT would drive change. But that rarely if ever succeeds.

• that the costs and complexity were initially underestimated - by about £7bn - because nobody had an understanding of what was needed.

• that speed was unduly important. One gateway review suggested that key staff didn't have time to take action on recommendations or learn lessons.

• the programme as a whole, according to one Gateway Review, was not assessed against a list of Common Causes of Failure, as published by the National Audit Office. Only individual projects were assessed against the list.

How many of these findings apply in the U.S. Health IT program in 2009?

Finally, about the aforementioned May 2009 post, Matthew Holt of the Healthcare Blog wrote that I had "gone loopy", i.e., crazy (see footnote to the above-linked May 2009 post). The Chairman of CCHIT Mark Leavitt wrote that concerns about health IT are expressed by "fearmongers" and should be "laughed off."

These cavalier attitudes are a major part of what has gone wrong in HIT, as well as our society more generally.

Not to draw a specific comparison with these individuals, but our society is crumbling, and it's in no small part due to clowns in leadership roles, rather than as performers in Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth.

According to Matthew Holt and Mark Leavitt, Health IT concerns are a laughing matter, expressed by crazy people.

I (and many like minded colleagues) don't find healthcare information technology issues a laughing matter, however.

-- SS

July 1 Addendum:

More analysis is at E-Health Insider at this link.