England's National Health Service is effectively ending the National Programme for IT, moving away from a centralized, national strategy for deploying IT to hospitals and clinics across the country in favor of "a more locally-led plural system of procurement," according to a statement released by health minister Simon Burns. The decision is supposed to save 700 million pounds ($1.1 billion), including 200 million pounds ($309 million) from narrowing the scope of a Computer Sciences Corp. contract.

"Improving IT is essential to delivering a patient-centered NHS. But the nationally imposed system is neither necessary nor appropriate to deliver this," Burns said, according to E-Health Insider. "We will allow hospitals to use and develop the IT they already have and add to their environment, either by integrating systems purchased through the national contracts or elsewhere."

A Department of Health spokesperson insisted to the British health IT publication that the NPfIT was not being "scrapped," though. The NHS will keep some efforts that are underway, including the Choose and Book scheduling system, and will honor contracts already in place. However, the NHS will transition existing projects to local oversight by 2012.

"It is clear that the National Programme for IT has delivered important changes for the NHS including an infrastructure which the NHS today depends on for providing safe and responsive healthcare," says Christine Connelly, the Department of Health's director general for informatics. "Now the NHS is changing, we need to change the way IT supports those changes, bringing decisions closer to the front line and ensuring that change is manageable and holds less risk for NHS organizations."

Many analysts were not surprised. "This seems like a confirmation of what has been clear for a long time," Gartner VP Jonathan Edwards tells E-Health Insider. "The government has endorsed local procurement of electronic patient records and free choice of suppliers; while not stating the obvious, that there will be no central funding."

To Murray Bywater, managing director of Silicon Bridge Research, the only surprise was that "the government has not done this before."

To learn more:
- read this E-Health Insider story
- have a look at this analysis from the same publication

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