
Quick easy NHS cash.
How hard is it to tell the NHS ``get us a working medical system, here is a sack of money and we expect your justification of spending at the end of the year''?
I dare say the NHS doesn't need IT as such. What it does need is the right information at the right place at the right time, often in a right hurry. It also needs all this in adverse conditions, like when there's a war on or just a power outage. This is all pretty well understood.
I also dare say that throwing more computers at the problem, inevitably running windows, will make the problem more expensive, over and beyond the value of the computers and software added, and in fact ever greater numbers of computers makes the whole thing ever more suspectible to windows based virus infections. Now I'll grant that the NHS is supposed to know about viruses, but not windows ones.
The amazing conclusion this brings me to is that we should go back to focusing on the information need, double-check our assumptions, and find robust solutions that don't bring with them more problems of their own. If that means the NHS ends up faxing around patient dossiers in high definition, then so be it. For privacy you can add paper shredders. They're easy to use and using them is easy to enforce. The NHS need to do their thing, not add IT on top of the porkbarrel pile to unsolve a well-understood problem.
Just curbing the endless politicking alone is bound to save billions.