UCL CHIME

Barach Obama’s early announcements on electronic health records have prompted a series of alarmed responses, including warnings on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times and, most notably, this incredibly striking posting, a unique combination of dramatic personal testimony and informed professional analysis. A number of bloggers have picked up on this damning account of professionals struggling with a dysfunctional EPR. Of course it could be used as an argument for Obama’s proposal for much much larger investment in the field, but as the author’s subsequent piece makes clear, the author is opposed to the initiative, believing that healthcare is simply too complex a domain for any major centralised, government-led, infrastructure project to be successful.

From a UK perspective, this is completely fascinating. Critics of NPfIT sometimes talk as if screwing up big health IT projects is a British thing, like the mid-innings batting collapse or the fluffed penalty shoot-out. Of course it isn’t. I wonder if some of those involved in the early decisions around NPfIT were similarly too easily convinced that American technology would somehow be able to solve problems that had hitherto been intractable. In practice the evidence seems to suggest that different healthcare systems require different IT systems.

It will be interesting to observe the similarities and differences between the US initiative and the UK as their initiative takes shapes and ours refocuses and adapts.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 1:55 pm by Paul Taylor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can leave a response yourself.