We're mildly unconvinced by this medical records contract

This strikes us - from an admittedly sketchy knowledge of IT - as being not the right solution:

Silicon Valley billionaires are lining up to bid for a £480m NHS contract to transform the health service’s creaking IT systems into a high tech database.

The so-called NHS Federated Data Platform has attracted a bid from US artificial intelligence company C3.AI, founded by billionaire Thomas Siebel, The Telegraph can reveal.

Moving back one step to what the Federated thing is:

A flagship programme intended to bring down NHS waiting backlogs is to be delayed after becoming mired in bureaucracy.

The £360 million federated data platform is seen as critical to reducing waiting lists, with a record 7.1 million people now waiting for treatment.

When the plans were announced in the spring, health chiefs said that the system would be an “essential enabler to transformational improvements” across the NHS.

Experts have warned that progress in clearing the lists has been set back by chaotic recording systems.

We would not argue that NHS IT is all Ticketty Boo, we are after all rational beings. Greater centralisation would not be our base plan for sorting it out, however. We do recall what happened last time a central solution was tried, £11.5 billion was spent to produce not one, single, usable line of code.

This is also one of those areas where even we agree there’s a role for government. As with the internet itself. But to remind what the government involvement in the internet was - it wasn’t to plan how cat pictures get to you, not how advertising should work, nor even what people should use it for. It was to develop and define the interface.

If the output of some process, machine, effort, whatever, can pass through that TCP/IP interface then it can go on the internet. Any process, machine, effort, whatever that can absorb information through TCP/IP can read the internet and all that’s on it.

Yes, yes, that’s gross simplification to an absurd level. Yet it is also true.

Which is what the reform of NHS IT should be. Define the interface. Information that is in a format that can be read in “this manner” is an acceptable output of any process, machine or effort. Any information that cannot be read in that manner is not allowed. So too with any demand from any machine or process for information as an input. It must be able to accept that in this one specified format. Proprietary methods are allowed, of course they are. But only if any system can both emit and collect all information in the one standardised form as well.

Government’s role is to define and then insist - very forcefully - on that one interface.

We’d go further too, in not allowing anyone in British Government to alter, upgrade, improve or anything else that interface. Pick one - say OpenEMR - and that’s it.

We then gain the best of both worlds. We retain - or even get for the first time - all the glories of markets and competition in how information is to be processed, increasing productivity, lowering costs and all that. We entirely avoid technological lockin by having that open and fixed standard. We also gain an integrated health care IT system - the interface, the portability of the only important thing, the information.

Works for us, now tell us why it doesn’t work in reality?