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09 Sep 2010
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The government hopes to trim £700m off the cost of implementing the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) by localising its activities.
In a statement, the Department of Health (DoH) confirmed the £12bn project’s procurement strategy will be de-nationalised and become locally led in future.
It also confirmed that all the pre-existing contracts awarded under the programme will be honoured.
Further reading
Health minister Simon Burns said a national approach was no longer appropriate to deliver on the NPIT’s objectives.
He said: “Moving IT systems closer to the frontline will release £700m extra in savings. Every penny saved through productivity gains will be reinvested to improve patient care.”
The future of the project has been under scrutiny since the government announced a review of all ICT projects being undertaken by government departments in June.
The DoH claims the proposed changes will make it easier for NHS organisations to implement and manage future IT deployments.
Christine Connelly, NHS director general for informatics at DoH, said: “We need to change the way IT supports [the NHS], bringing decisions [about IT] closer to the frontline and ensuring that change is manageable and holds less risk for NHS organisations."
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Best Practices in Retail that local NHS organisations can adopt
While the government is reducing costs, calling to have better value for money, we also must not forget that patients are demanding higher levels of safety and better service (including reduced hospital stays and waiting lists).
Another interesting note to throw to the mix is that in the US, insurers have even moved towards a 'no pay for preventable events' stance where they refuse to pay for incidents such as hospital contracted diseases, or illness or injury caused by misidentification errors.
This direction will have an increasing impact on insurance based health systems, government funded services in the UK as the government demand better value for money. There are some best practices in the retail sector that local NHS organisations can learn to increase their productivity and efficiency.
For instance, asset tracking is a key function within the retail industry that the healthcare industry could also adopt. Where retail companies use it to track inventory on site, location, identifying them via department, item ID, serial number, local NHS hospitals can also adopt asset tracking to keep track of their high cost assets as they are moved about the building. Placing an unobtrusive tag on high value assets such as blood units, medication, organs and urgently needed equipment can solve the problems of loss and having to trace equipment at short notice.
This will allow hospitals to maintain a complete audit trial in ensuring that the healthcare system becomes more transparent and is measured. Raigmore Hospital in Scotland is a good example on how this works and a case study video can be found on our Virtual Healthcare website at http://healthcare.virtualzebra.com/
Posted by Luca Dell'Orto, Zebra Technologies | 20 Sep 2010
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