Prime
contractor Fujitsu has fired IDX, its chief software partner in the
Southern Cluster of England’s NHS National Programme for IT. The company
obtained permission last month, subject to contract, from NHS Connecting
for Health to drop IDX’s product in favour of Cerner’s Millenium, “in
order to fulfil their obligations for the provision of key services to the
NHS”. Care providers in the Southern cluster will now be offered Millenium
instead of IDX’s solution, CareCast.
bjhc&im has learnt that Fujitsu’s actions follow the
decision by the NHS IT Director General, Richard Granger, last year that
IDX should prioritise the delivery of CareCast to the University College
London Hospital (UCLH) over its work for the Southern and London clusters.
This caused IDX to divert resources away from its other commitments.
Switching from IDX’s CareCast to Cerner’s Millenium could
have an impact on the hardware platform employed to provide the service
infrastructure within the Southern cluster, and the mix of hardware
suppliers to the National Programme. CareCast runs on the Hewlett-Packard
NonStop platform under Guardian. The NonStop fail-safe architecture is
derived from the family of machines built by Tandem, which HP acquired
when it merged with Compaq. Cerner’s hardware partner of choice is
increasingly IBM.
IDX’s implementation of CareCast for its two English clusters
has been beset with delays from the outset. Chief amongst these were
problems associated with anglicising the product for the NHS. UCLH found
that CareCast did not comply with the NHS data model and it needed
considerable modification to support NHS practices. It is a development of
an architecture that is 25 years old and only runs on Tandem mainframes.
There are also few programmers left who can write in its development
languages, COBOL and SCOBOL.
Full story in bjhc&im July 2005 (1446 words)
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