NHS IT under investigation as MPs question bosses

The Public Accounts Committee will look into the service's floundering electronic records project

The Connecting for Health project should help doctors to access electronic records

The government's Public Accounts Committee is to question NHS bosses today as part of an investigation into the health service's struggling IT systems.

The Connecting for Health project is supposed to link every hospital and GP in England, allowing universal NHS access to the records of 50 million patients.

Roll-out of the new systems should have been completed two years ago, but just 34 of the 169 target hospitals have been upgraded so far. Even among those institutions that have installed the systems, 21 have been given earlier and now obsolete versions.

Among the experts due to appear before MPs today are NHS chief executive David Nicholson, and Fujitsu Services' Peter Hutchinson, group director for UK public services.