BUSINESS

A bloody mess: Britain's health information network

With the United States considering its own national health network, what could America learn from the British effort? The short answer: Don't do it how they're doing it.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. April 10, 2006.

As the United States seeks to implement its own health network by 2014, Britain's experience is providing significant lessons, driving home the point that assembling a national network is a complicated, gargantuan task, even in a country where, presumably, under a single-payer system, it should be easier.

That's judging by the rancor inspired by the $11 billion plan, under way by the National Health Service. And who could blame physicians and others for getting upset, what with only a small portion -- a scheduling program (or programme, as they'd say in Britain) -- even on the verge of implementation, a year behind schedule?

"Huge waste of money and confidentiality likely to be compromised. ... The biggest government I.T. disaster yet?" wrote an anonymous British general practitioner in response to a survey released last January by Medix UK. That survey found physicians becoming more skeptical about the cost of the program and how it's being implemented, with 57% of the 1,329 respondents saying the project was not a good use of NHS' resources.

"Chaotic, slow and confused implementation," another doctor wrote.

"My overall concerns are that it's a massive program with the right objectives, but it's costing a fortune and it's being totally mismanaged," Dr. Nigel de Kare Silver, a general practitioner in London, told the British publication e-Health Insider late last year. He also told the BBC that the government system, as now proposed, would force him to dump the electronic medical record system he just bought.

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