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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, amednews staff. April 10, 2006.

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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.