NHS computer link branded a £12bn flop

Hospitals across Greater Manchester will be left with “second-rate” computer systems after the disastrous failure of the £12.4 billion scheme to link-up the entire NHS, MPs have warned.

Not a single hospital trust in the area has installed the Lorenzo software to integrate patient-care records — eight years after the company behind it boasted it was ready to be rolled out.

Only 10 of 166 trusts across the North, the Midlands and Eastern England have received Lorenzo, with delays condemned as crazy by the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

Now its stinging report has urged the Department of Health (DoH) to allow hospitals to turn to alternative companies by ending the effective monopoly enjoyed by CSC, the firm concerned. And it warned that failure to act would leave many trusts with little choice but to continue with outdated interim systems that could be very expensive to maintain and to upgrade.

Margaret Hodge, the PAC’s Labour chairman, also condemned a secret £200 million advance payment given to CSC only three months ago, saying: “This is unacceptable.” The report is the latest in a long line that have criticised the National Programme for IT — the biggest civilian IT scheme attempted — which has been in disarray since it missed its first deadlines in 2007.

It is now accepted that the original aim — to replace paper-based clinical records with a single database, listing prescribed drugs, allergies and long-term conditions — cannot be achieved.

The DoH has spent £6.4 billion on the projectand is on course to spend a further £4.3billion, while barely cutting the fees to its IT suppliers, the PAC found.

One is Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), which was awarded the contract to install Lorenzo at hospitals and primary care trusts (PCTs) in the North, Midlands and East.

In evidence, the DoH claimed it may be more expensive to terminate the contract than to complete it, despite well-documented problems dating back to 2008.

But the report said the US company had told the United States Securities and Exchange Commission that it expected to receive “materially less than the net asset value of its contract”, if it was terminated.