Central IT will save NHS £10bn

Centralised, rather than local buying, will save the health service more than £10bn, claims NHS IT director general Richard Granger.

He told Computing that developing a national electronic patient records (EPR) service using the traditional piecemeal approach to health service technology buying would have cost nearly five times as much as the total £2.3bn National Programme.

And the contract for electronic bookings - signed last week with SchlumbergerSema for £64.5m - would have cost an extra £50m.

The EPR figures come from a confidential report by consultant McKinsey.

It said we would achieve enormous economies of scale. It produced a figure of £12bn for the cost under traditional purchasing arrangements to acquire national EPR,' said Granger.

'The National Programme is about the aggregation of purchasing power - in the ebooking contract we have secured a lower unit cost for software, hardware and services than ever before in the health service,' he said.

Granger also denied rumours that insufficient central funding means local health organisations will have to find considerable extra money to deliver the National Programme.

Some local funding will be needed to cover business requirements such as training and process re-design, but the technology investment will all be paid for centrally, he says.

'There is inevitably a lot of detail to be resolved on the boundaries between buying IT and getting it deployed and the business expenditure,' he said.

'But this is not about a central project demanding spending be undertaken locally. This is about a central project making significant investment in the local health economy and the benefits staying in that local economy,' said Granger.

Local trusts will also have the option to spend their own money for premium services such as EPR delivered on handheld devices rather than through basic terminals.

The ebooking contract was announced by Secretary of State for Health John Reid last week.

Once the system is live, patients needing hospital appointments will be able to choose from a range of locations, dates and times.

'Ebooking will revolutionise the way patients access the NHS,' said Reid.

The first region will go live in mid-2004 and ebooking will be fully implemented in 2005.