NHS spent £1.25m on now-abandoned Care Connect service
Care Connect cost £1,600 for every patient query resolved during its pilot phase
An NHS patient feedback service, dubbed Care Connect, cost £1.25m - or on average, £1,600 for every patient query resolved during its pilot phase.
A Freedom of Information (FOI) request by Digital Health News revealed that the scheme, which ran between 2013 and 2015, and was pioneered by NHS England's national director for patients and information, Tim Kelsey, had 22 trusts in London and the North of England piloting the service, but is no longer going to be rolled out across the UK as originally planned.
The service enabled patients to use a number of channels: online, phone, text or social media, to ask a question, provide feedback or log concerns on their experiences with the NHS. It was based on a US service called 311, and it was scheduled to be rolled out across the UK by February 2014.
But it never caught on with patients, and was therefore costing the NHS extortionate amounts per use.
The FOI response, said for those patients who did use the service - 53 per cent used phone, 19 per cent used the online function, 16 per cent used text messaging, 10 per cent used social media and two per cent used email.
The ‘ask a question' facility online was the most popular function, according to NHS England, but this was switched off when NHS Direct closed in March 2014.
"NHS England considers that had an online channel remained available, total activity for this function would have been higher," the organisation said in a statement.
In addition to responding to the various concerns and questions through the service, Care Connect case handlers also helped with 3,000 general enquiries on behalf of the Customer Contact Centre, said the NHS.
Public sector IT projects failing after using up a lot of taxpayers' money are nothing new, and in fact, Care Connect would struggle to get into the 10 worst ever government IT projects list that Computing compiled earlier this year.