A feeding frenzy has broken out among suppliers of computing services in the UK following news of a 1bn pound plan over the next seven years to give every patient in the UK’s all-embracing National Health Service NHS an electronic record. The first stage will be a 40m pound project next year to connect all general practitioners’ surgeries to the health network NHSNet. This will enable them to hold videoconferencing sessions with specialists and communicate with hospitals and chemists by email. The program is set for a slow start because the fragile IT resources currently possessed by the NHS are concentrated on the massive task of making their present systems year 2000 compatible.
