The government hasn't demonstrated a particular aptitude for running major IT projects on time or budget,
Has anyone worked out what the government does have a particular aptitude for? Something good I mean.
The UK government has been advised against a hasty shift of vital data sets from one quango to another as it aims to centralise medical data collection and management. Data on disease diagnoses, treatment and outcomes is a crucial resource for the health service, and the government has argued that better links between various …
Yes.
I was involved with the specification and procurement of an electronic patient record under NPfIT. We had just got to the board meeting at which the successful supplier was to be announced. On the way to the meeting [literally - in his car], the chairman received a call from NHS Central to say that the plan had been scrapped, and a new one was to start - so all funding withdrawn.
This set HNS clinical IT back by nearly ten years.
But remember please, Churchill instigated _all_ the planning for 'what would happen after the war was won' and, in the middle of his administration, c.1942-43, got his bods - ministers and civil servants - to work on the education act, as it became, the nhs as it became, and the planning reform laws, as they became. In truth, those are as much his greatest legacies as that other one for which he is customarily celebrated.
Has anyone worked out what the government does have a particular aptitude for? Something good I mean.
Well, they seem to be mostly seized by inaction, what with the distractions of Brexit and trying to control the bag of fighting cats that is the cabinet etc. Just think of all the things they could royally screw up if they had the time and ability to pass more legislation. Let's spin their aptitude as "masterly inaction".
Where data is being collected by PHE for the purposes of PHE, I see precisely zero point in giving it to NHS Digital. My partner works for PHE, and there's enough difficulty getting provider units to collect high quality data. If PHE need to go through NHSD to get the data, then we can be sure that there will be even greater bureaucratic bungling, with NHSD whining that they can't be accountable for the input quality of providers, even though they will have the relationship with the data collectors of those providers.
The current system is far from ideal. But what's proposed will have very limited advantages, and will eliminate the relationships and local knowledge that the clinicians currently examining the data possess.
And one final though, who are "NHS Digital"? From the review document: "NHS Digital is the new trading name for the Health and Social Care Information Centre." My emphasis, reach your own conclusion. NHSD were HSCIC, and as far as I can now tell, before that they were ISCG, and as such the failed Care.Data scheme was entirely theirs - this is a failed bureaucracy that should have been scrapped years ago, and lives on trying to grab operational data to justify its existence.
They need another system to join all the systems together. It's systems all the way down.
It always confused me why business and I've seen it happen a few times can migrate systems and data with minimal relative fuss, sure I understand that the NHS is huge but so are some of the migrations I've seen and scaling or segmentation can be done when done right.
I will not grant consent for any of my medical data to be shared while a full postcode is part of the data. I understand location is useful for certain things such as tracing spread of infection, but a postal sector (postcode without last two characters) is more than sufficient for this. Given full postcode, gender and age decade, anonimity has largely gone down the plughole.