Another Saga of "Blame the Vendor" Leaks Out of the UK

There are days when I am sure that Neal Patterson, CEO of Cerner, regrets the little pas de deux that his company has been engaged in with the British government and its NHS for years. Mr. HIStalk alerts us to another chapter to this continuing saga with its "blame the EMR vendor" theme:

Speaking of Cerner, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London faces fines of $650,000 per month for lengthy patient backlogs that it blames on the “dreadful” Cerner Millennium. I doubt it’s that simple, but blaming the computer is always convenient.

Here's an excerpt from the source (see: Barts faces fine over IT failures):

St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London faces being fined £400,000 a month for missing patient care targets as a result of the troubled NHS IT programme....Tory MP Richard Bacon, a member of the Commons public accounts committee, which scrutinises public spending, said the £12.7bn NHS IT programme had led to Barts developing a backlog of thousands of patients waiting for treatment....He said the Cerner Millennium system had caused “havoc” wherever it had been deployed in the NHS. The hospital was failing to meet a Department of Health target that no one should wait more than 18 weeks to receive hospital treatment from the time they are referred by a GP.

I have covered the issue of "blame the vendor" in a previous notes (see: Do Hospital Executives Use Their IT Vendors as Scapegoats?). My guess is that there's plenty of blame to go around with the NHS' EMR program and that their electronic medical record problems are multifactorial (see: NHS Computer Czar "Outed" by his Mum). I also believe that any large-scale IT project mounted by the NHS will inevitably end in chaos, with or without Millennium in the mix. You have a mixture of a creaking government bureaucracy, hospital personnel who may not be motivated to put in a day's work, and a host of grand-standing politicians playing to the crowd. Did you note the name of the Tory MP quoted above -- it's BACON. From what I know about the usual wait for hospital admission in the U.K., 18 weeks seems like good performance. Comparable in some ways to Canada (see: The Fundamental Flaws in the Canadian Healthcare Delivery System). Does everyone understand the irony of the British government fining a hospital $650,000 per month that it itself owns and manages. The government hospital executives will surely ask for a larger operating budget to cover their recurring fines? Another alternative is to withhold payments to Cerner. Blame the vendor.

Comments

[Todd Romanik]

This information echoes exactly the slow smoldering mess created by use of Millennium across the 21 North American Shriners Hospitals, over the last three years. This deployment has been harming our patients through scheduling nightmares, improperly/incompletely completed admission orders, IT outages, and missed improper-drug-dosage and drug-interaction sentinel events (that we were told not to report). The Future Orders section, which was "force fit" for clinic future visits, has been a complete fiasco. The workarounds have been many and basically, we are now forced to enter everything twice: first by using paper-based approaches (which we trust) for our actual clinical care and electronic data entry, often entered long after the fact, to satisfy the Draconian missives regularly coming from Tampa that we must use the system. All in all, I agree that "dreadful" is the operative word to describe this product. "Frightening" might be a better word. I wish they would just turn it off.