Contract for England's controversial health data platform delayed The contract award for the £480 million ($588 million) NHS Federated Data Platform – a huge analytics project for one of the world's largest healthcare providers – has been delayed by a few weeks. When the competition was formally launched in January, official documents suggested keen bidders – controversial spy-tech firm …
The NHS is dying through underfunding, Brexit-originated loss of staff, Brexit-originated inflation and strikes. People cannot easily obtain healthcare and consider a trip to hospital to come with a free dose of Covid.
Lots of us are never going to use the apps or video appointments. Anyone who can afford it pays for private healthcare due to the waiting lists. NHS services are being centralised as there are so few staff and so little money, and people just can't get to them.
There are 7.5 million on the waiting lists getting sicker. And much of the software creating the data could do with some treatment too. Was it 24,000 patient letters that didn't get sent out because they were stored in a folder nobody knew about? How accessible is all that data? People are relying on anything they can get from Boots OTC. Painkillers especially. Post-Brexit, we now live with illness rather than fixing it. G7 in name only. First world in name only.
Like most things in Brexit Britain, the NHS is collapsing, winding down, falling apart - pick your term of choice. And it is going to get worse, not better. Would you buy used data from a service like that? Is it reliable? Is it relevant to a fully functioning healthcare service? Big data is not all equal. It's value lies in its relevance.
The NHS isn't particularly under-funded - it's just very bad at spending its funding on what the general public expect it to spend it on.
Swathes of management layers, project managers, EDI Managers and other elements of the bloated bureocracy soak up a large part of the funding. And although it's branded as one entity, it's actually made up of many commissioning groups and overlapping trusts, all with their own management structures, plus assorted contractors, consultants, agency staff, etc.
Historically, the NHS was one of the most efficient healthcare providers in the world - though it was a bit chaotic.
It's still not that bad, but its decline in efficiency has to some extent been driven by an obsession that data and more management would somehow make it more efficient still. That obsession has not come from the NHS, but largely from central government and the Treasury in particular.
Part of the excess of management results from the need now for every episode of care to be costed, recorded and billed and from the transfer of funds around the system to make this shadow billing system work. That system is entirely pointless in a free healthcare system: it may give politicians more insight into where the money is going, but it doesn't really give them any meaningful control (which is probably just as well). It does, however, make it much easier to incorporate private healthcare providers as you have internal price benchmarks against which evaluate bids and an accounting system to make the payments.
You can, of course, view this in two ways. Either it's a genuine attempt to make the health service more efficient by forcing it to demonstrate its cost-effectiveness compared to the private sector or its an enabling step to total privatisation. Given that it's fairly apparent now that forcing the NHS to create the bureaucratic overhead of private health care has been terrible for its operational effectiveness and yet that no-one is talking of reversing it, I think we can see where it's heading.
It's all part of the increasing incompetence of government. The focus on trivia, short-term news agenda, the shifting opinions of focus groups along with the subordination of the civil service makes it increasingly impossible for politics to deliver big, complex things whether they be the NHS, HS2 or a credible defence force. It was always tricky, but politics seems to have given up on the notion on the boring, tough bits of government. It would once have been incredible that a British politician would have suggested that the government had no responsibility to see the population was at least fed and housed and yet you hear it frequently these days from at least one mainstream party. There's been a complete failure of moral ambition in politics and it's been replaced by pure self interest. Which is kind of the opposite of what we have governments for.
Getting requirements nailed down is always good, but outsourced projects fail more than in house ones in that scenario. Partially because you're over a barrel at that point with your current supplier, where you either get the wrong thing delivered for (maybe) the original cost, nothing delivered if you can walk away and lose what you've already paid, or pay a premium to change the spec.
The NHS is paying £77m per year (as of 2018) to EMIS and TPP just for patient records systems that probably don't even cover the whole of the NHS. Could build quite a team with that budget!
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