UK Ends Health-Service IT Upgrade

The UK said it was scrapping a £11 billion ($17 billion) information-technology program for its state-run health service, saying that some of the £6.4 billion already spent has been wasted and that the program today "is not fit to provide the modern IT services" the health-care system needs.

Launched in 2002 under the previous Labour government, the program was hailed as one of the biggest IT projects ever attempted. It aimed to digitize patient records and link all parts of the sprawling National Health Service, or NHS, and was closely watched by other countries attempting to adopt new healthcare IT. BT Group PLC and Computer Sciences Corp. are among the suppliers involved. The scrapping of the ambitious UK program could have implications for the digital health-care push under way in other countries, including the US, which has suffered its own setbacks as it attempts to digitize medical records. Supporters of modern health-care IT say it can cut costs and improve patient care, but the software is often expensive, complex to design and cumbersome for physicians to use.