e-Referrals: not another ‘NHS IT disaster’?

The replacement for the NHS’ Choose & Book appointment booking system, the NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS), went live on Monday 18 months later than originally scheduled. Early indications suggest that e-RS may not be a good advert for the pro-SME and open source approach that the Government took when procuring it through the G-Cloud framework.

As e-RS went live, the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) published a ‘summary of known problems/issues’ with the system which details 33 issues that users of the system face at the moment. Then as demand increased yesterday users were prevented from accessing the system.

In short, e-Referrals has all the hallmarks of a system that has gone live too soon before known glitches have been resolved and proper beta testing. Given the history of Choose & Book and the issues with uptake (which had more to do with politics and process change than the system itself - see NHS IT: learning lessons from Choose & Book if you’re a PublicSectorViews subscriber), it will be a huge shame if users’ early experiences of e-RS are negative.

TechMarketView subscription clients can read our full analysis of the story on UKHotViewsExtra today - NHS e-Referrals: here we go again?.

If your organisation doesn’t yet subscribe to TechMarketView’s in-depth research and analysis on the UK software, IT services and business process services markets and you’d like details of our 2015 subscription packages, Deborah Seth from our Client Services team would be happy to help.

Posted by Tola Sargeant at '13:41' - Tagged: health   sme   agile   open+source