>>>>>After spending billions
>>>>>
>>>>>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8397854.stm
>>>>>
>>>>>Why do I feel a small team could have delivered 90% of what they wanted at 10% or less of the cost. (And no I'm not saying it could have been done in Fox :-) )
>>>>
>>>>I certainly agree that the scale of the over-run is preposterous and that the aims were probably over-ambitious.
>>>>But the cost of software development is probably only a small part of the total (can't find coroboration of this tho :-{). It also involved the whole hardware infrastructure, digitizing billions of medical records etc. That's not something you can do with 'a small team'
>>>>
>>>>Best,
>>>>Viv
>>>
>>>OTOH maybe you could just look forward and say from now records are digital or existing records could simply have been scanned and be available in that form and billions ?, I thought the UK population was about 70 last time I counted.
>>
>>Ok. Wrong on the billions - looks like it's about 50 million. But the logic of implementing the £12bn system and only having it deal with 'new' cases would mean that it would be years before its capacity would be used.
>>
>>> Hardware etc should come to nowhere near that. Most medical facilities have equipment already and a solution that was flexible to allow the use of that equipment could have been found.
>>
>>I don't think there's much point in pursuing this (a) because I basically agree with you and (b) no breakdown of the overall budget seems to be available. Bear in mind that the NHS spends 1bn a year on IT anyway. Also the cost of hooking up the current diverse systems would probalby have run into a least as much trouble :-{
>
>Couldn't we form some sort of advisory group and bill the government a few 100K. We could fall out and that would make it cost even more :-)

Sure - I'm game. Draw up a proposal. Point out that it we provide conflicting advice then there's a faint chance that some of it might be useful :-}