Cambridge’s eHospital problems and Scotland’s IT projects

ComputerWeekly.com has published my article on Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust’s problems bringing in eHospital, a £200m IT system based around software from Epic and hardware from HP. While the trust initially reported all was going well, eHospital has recently been fingered by Monitor and the Care Quality Commission as contributing to the trust’s problems.

I spoke to a number of people with knowledge of eHospital, including this former IT employee of the trust who spoke on condition of anonymity:

eHospital was obviously going to cost far more than £200m. I and others were objecting that this wasn’t realistic. They didn’t want to hear it. There was a plan, there was a vision and it was going to happen. There was no sense or reason to the process, it was bloody-mindedness.

The trust makes a robust defence of eHospital, both in comments I quoted from in the piece. Since the article’s publication it has pointed out that it has gained stage 6 status for the project from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. But while everyone I spoke to thought a substantial IT project was required at the trust, there do appear to be some significant questions to answer about eHospital. The full article is here.

The Register has also published a piece by me looking at Scottish Government IT projects including the Named Person scheme which aims to track all children, a major upgrade to CCTV led by Police Scotland and the use of Scotland’s NHS Central Register (which is a separate system to that used in England and Wales) as a Scottish ID system.