England Unplugs Its National Health Technology Initiative

After nearly a decade of effort and billions of dollars, the British National Health Service has scrapped its efforts to implement a national health information exchange.

Granted, some of the announcement contained political posturings of Labour versus the Tories, but all in all, the failure of this ambitious effort reflects the gap between big ideas and real implementation. It certainly is a cautionary tale for our own national vision and expectations for health IT.

While the VA has achieved a reasonably functional system at modest costs, our own country has numerous tales of regional efforts that proved to be unworkable or economically unsustainable. Many medical centers are scrapping earlier systems that cannot integrate with different software silos within their own facility. Aside from the expense of purchasing new software and its maintenance, there are the countless hours of personnel training and clinical inefficiency as learning curves are mastered.

While I am certainly not a troglodyte about technology, policy makers need to possess a realistic assessment of the time, costs, and ultimate functionality of current and evolving IT systems. Clinical professionals are too busy caring for patients to be dragged into blind alleys of overly optimistic systems implementation.