The NHS's multi-billion pound IT system is between two and two and a half years behind schedule, the government minister in charge admitted yesterday, as a survey of doctors found 85% backed calls for an inquiry into the scheme.
Lord Warner also conceded that the overall cost is likely to be nearer £20bn over the next 10 years than the widely quoted figure of £6.2bn
The admission that the electronic patient record, which should have been up and running at the end of last year, will not be completed until early 2008, came as a BBC poll found around half of GPs view the new "Choose and Book" system for making online hospital appointments as "poor" or "fairly poor". Choose and Book is just one of four parts of the IT programme, the others being the centralised medical records system, electronic prescribing, and the electronic exchange of X-rays and scans.
The survey, conducted by medical pollsters Medix, and completed by 447 hospital doctors and 340 GPs, found that, although Choose and Book has been rolled out to 92% of surgeries, half of GPs rarely or never used it, and only 6% always did.
Nearly 60% of GPs disagreed that it provided satisfactory levels of confidentiality and almost two thirds of GPs and hospital doctors said the cost was not a good use of NHS resources.
With doctors describing Choose and Book as a "disaster of Titanic proportions", Lord Warner used an interview in the Financial Times to offer "clarity" on the true cost of the entire programme, and to explain the delay. He admitted some parts were "going pretty well and pretty much on time" while others were "going more slowly than we would otherwise like".
He insisted the inflated final price of the project had always been planned. Health officials stressed that the £6.2bn figure covers just the core components of what is supposed to be the world's most sophisticated medical IT system. Hospitals and GPs will have to pay more than £1bn a year for software, hardware and staff training, but officials said they do this now.
The lapsed schedule is partly due to delays in providing the software, which is being developed by iSoft and other companies. But a dispute within the medical profession over what should be included on the national medical record, and whether patients should opt in or out of it, has also caused delay.
The government had intended that extensive information on major diagnoses, operations and recent tests as well as current medication and allergies would be placed on the online record and that patients would have to "opt out" if they did not want this. But the BMA's GPs committee has rejected this proposal, saying patients' consent should always be sought.
