Friday's Channel 4 news - NHS IT systems

[datestamp]

Did anyone see the C4 news last night at 7pm. They finally seem to be asking questions about the vast amount of money being pumped into the NHS IT projects. There were mutterings about connections between Patricia Hewitt and Andersen / Accenture. (Yes the BBC woke up to this a long time ago). C4 were asking whether all the governments central IT stragies were somewhat uncomprehensible, and were being handed on a plate for the large consultancies to sort out. On the NHS side they mentioned Choose and Book, and interviewed a doctor who wasn't convinced that it was cost effective with his surgery time. And so it went on. Nothing too radical, but C4 at least starting to ask questions about money and the bottomless pit, into which NL was pouring money into the big consultancies wallets. Or do we think that it was just a "slow news night"?

[TinTin]

Con-sultans !

I saw that and it's another piece of Lie-bour hypocrisy. In 1997, they were slating the Tories for spending just £ 0.5 bn a year in consultants, now they spend 5 times as much : £ 2.5 bn and that's just the management side. The old story of 'Give me your watch so I can tell you what time it is!'. Complete time-wasters the lot of them, as everyone that has worked with them knows. It took a few years for their customers, mostly blue chip private companies, to realise how useless they are and that unfortunately says a lot for their so-called management (why ask someone to do the job for you in the first place?) but they got found out and were kicked out for good. So they did 2 things :
1. Descended on the public sector which under the Socialists always flourishes. Advising on anything and everything, inc. the Treasury and our Scottish wizard. Not only that, they are mostly responsible for the spin and counter-spin that is produced to disguise the Gov't mess.
2. Diversify by setting up IT depts and taking on huge IT projects that didn't have a clue about. Talking about blagging your way to a contract, they've blagged their way to virtually running the country (NHS, DWP and other depts) again thanks to the incompetent lot that has been elected to do just that.
Apparently the guy that was interviewed iin the programme (David Craig, a former consultant) has written 2 books, one of them called 'Rip Off' and the other 'Plundering the Public Sector' which is being serialised in one of the papers this week.

[datestamp]

Thanks TinTin. I'd forgotten about those things. I believe that problems with the projects are having interesting effects in the Stock Market:

NHS deal worries halve iSoft shares

It would seem that plenty of money is being spent:
The nine projects at the heart of NHS IT (Silicon.com)

The 11 companies that run 80 per cent of government IT

According to the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) those 11 companies are:
Accenture,
Atos Origin,
BT,
Capgemini ,
Capita,
CSC ,
EDS,
Fujitsu Services,
IBM,
LogicaCMG
Siemens .

[TinTin]

Read and Weep !

I've worked with (ie as a contractor) for 2 of them and alongside another 3-4 of the above cowboys. Their profit margins are mostly 200-300% and that's on the gross agency rate ! For that they should be producing all-singing, all-dancing IT systems, not old stuff reheated (methodologies) and recycled (software) served as nouvelle cuisine. A lot of implementations should be straight forward tried and tested solutions, instead they try and build something from scratch and that takes more time and money. Interestingly enough, most gov't contracts work on the same basis as ours, ie charging daily rates, not as a fixed amount with penalties for delays, so there is no incentive to finish on time and within budget. On one of the contracts, they wouldn't even let us take time off for holidays even when we had nothing to do, as they would not be able to charge maximum bums on seats !. Only way to stomach this is looking at it as a way of 'tax redistribution' whenever us contractors are engaged in gov't projects.

[mcquiggd]

Yep, Ive worked for two of that list, and alongside others...

On one occasion I worked on a project for the NHS. They made it an over complicated mess... there were simple approaches that were the obvious choice, then there was the Atos Origin approach that meant stupid amounts of unneccessary work.


As I remember some silly sod went and said 'everyone in the NHS needs email'.

So, rather than install an off the shelf solution, they wrote a new email system from scratch.

Barking mad.

[wendigo100]

I'm working on an NHS project now, for a big company but not one of the above. Our project seems to be going quite well at the moment, though a bit hectic.

Incidently, in February HMG suddenly and unexpectedly pulled the plug on a company in Surrey and moved the business to iSoft. The Surrey company were developing a good product too, so iSoft must be good. Unfortunately, the Surrey company went under as a result.

[stan2484]

I'm working on an NHS project now, for a big company but not one of the above. Our project seems to be going quite well at the moment, though a bit hectic.

Incidently, in February HMG suddenly and unexpectedly pulled the plug on a company in Surrey and moved the business to iSoft. The Surrey company were developing a good product too, so iSoft must be good. Unfortunately, the Surrey company went under as a result.

Believe me the iSoft product is a pile of sh*te, I have worked on both the primary and secondary care systems and they are a complete bag, not helped by some of the infrastructure designed by the LSP's mind.

More than likely the switch was decided on the golf course's 19th hole and iSoft were picking up the tab (cheque will probably bounce mind!)!!

[TheMonkey]

That's eGov for you.

They haven't realised that consultants are there to make money, not provide solutions. The NHS should have their own permanent team and IT division rather than contracting it out.

[Board Game Geek]

ISoft

A number of surgeries that I look after use Isoft software, Synergy being the main application. As a whole, it works.

But....the real problem these surgeries have is when something goes wrong.

Case in point. Isoft released a patch to their application, which knocked out random network printers used in the surgery. Including the one in dispensary.

Guess how long it took for Isoft to finally put it right, as they have dial in access ?

2 hours ? 4 hours ? A day ?
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12 FEKKING DAYS

So, for 12 days, the dispensary couldn't print scripts. They had to make do with running to another office in a different part of the building to print scripts.

I was livid with ISoft Tech support. For a start, you are NEVER given a TTF. It just goes in to their "queue". The people who take the reference all sound like bored and pooly paid 18 year olds on their 1st job.

When I reported the fault on Day 1, I stressed that it was high priority. At the end of the call, I asked what priority it had been assigned. "Standard", came the reply. I hit the roof...if you cannot issue scripts, you may as well close the doors to a busy practice. The 18-year old techie agreed that it was "pretty important then". I explain that it will need an ISoft Engineer to attend site.

Day 2.....still no fix....calls are made to the ISoft team..."We're working on it"...

Day 3....more of the same
Day 4....get a call from someone.."Hello...you reported a fault. What appears to be the problem ? ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH ! Go through the whole explanation again, in painstaking detail.
Day 5....nothing
Day 6....The Surgery make an official complaint to the PCT
Day 7....The PCT breathe down my neck. Want to know what the hell is going on. I explain. The PCT make contact directly with ISoft.
Day 8....PCT call me and say "we're severely annoyed. We got the brush off. We cannot seem to leverage the company we pay to manage our surgeries clinical systems"
Day 9....nothing
Day 10...nothing. A call reveals that they are "working on it"
Day 11...Hooray ! They call the practice to explain that they have looked at the problem. They confirm that an Engineer needs to attend site ! (I said that right from the start !)
Day 12...Engineer turns up. Takes a whole day to reconfigure printing for 4-5 network printers.

At the end, the Practice and the PCT wrote very strong letters of complaint to Isoft. To date, 4-5 weeks later, there has been no reply.

This is just a normal example of the issues we face with Isoft. All Practice Managers meet every week or so in an area, so word spreads quickly.

Suffice to say, all sites in our area have leapt at the chance to ditch Isoft, and are now acticely migrating. I can only imagine what impact this is going to have on 20% of their business and future share price. I think, so far, you've only seem some minor bloodletting. ISoft haven't even met the guillotine yet.









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[BoredBloke]

"So, rather than install an off the shelf solution, they wrote a new email system from scratch."

Was that their crappy Route 400 email which a number of public sector organisations had? Before working at the doh in '96, I had never seen this product. I only ever saw it when I had the miosfortune to return to public sector work.

It truly was a bag of crap and massively easy to hack. I know somebody who hacked it and we got the low down on who was shagging who in the building.