NPunFIT
Probably because it got off to such a poor start, the National Programme for IT ("NPfIT") got a rebranding and became "Connecting for Health". Several billions later, we are still light years away from any system that delivers good quality decision support so I prefer to call them NPunfIT since that is exactly what we've got: a system that is definitely not fit for purpose.
I suspect that people operating in the commercial arena assume that we have functioning management systems to control such a collosal organisation consuming over £100,000,000,000 each year. We don't!
I think "the management" gets away with it because they operate the most byzantine of systems, usually at least three months behaind the event, and often with little resemblance to financial reality.
We are supposed to taking over commissioning budgets (the financial responsibility for funding a patient's hospital or specialist care).
- There is no financial system in place that provides any accurate information that is less than ten weeks old.
- There is no system in place that can accurately price the actual costs being charged to us by hospitals (since they are so often subject to local variations).
- The same patient can have the same procedure twice in the same hospital but we could be charged different amounts depending on which order they hospital codes the record of treatment (i.e. if they put "old" before " depressed" it might be a different charge to being "depressed" and them "old".)
- There is no system that accurately identifies whose budget should be deducted for which patient.so we are supposed to spend time working out whether we should have been charged for the treatment for that patient on that date.
- There is absolutely no forecasting system that monitors actuals against forecast against budget.
- Budgets are frequently set well into the year to which they apply. The record for us was November for a year starting the previous April.
Be scared. Be very, very scared.
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