Cabinet Office denies Watmore to take helm at NPfIT

The Cabinet Office and National Programme for IT have moved swiftly today to deny suggestions that Ian Watmore, the Government’s first Chief Information Officer, is poised to take the helm at the NHS IT modernisation project.

The prediction that Watmore was about to take a greater hand in steering the NPfIT was made in this month’s edition of the British Journal of Healthcare Computing (BJHC).

A key part of Watmore’s role as the Government’s CIO, however, is to prevent IT disasters and intervene in projects before they start to fail, largely by advising behind the scenes. The NHS NPfIT is one of the mission-critical projects Watmore reports on to the Prime Minister each quarter.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson told E-Health Insider: "Ian Watmore has never spoken to this publication [BJHC] and the article is pure speculation…"

The spokesperson added: "Ian acts as an adviser to government departments but does not personally lead any of the projects. To suggest he is poised to take personal charge of NPfIT is simply not true."

An NPfIT spokesperson added: "This is pure speculation." The article has clearly caused consternation within both the Cabinet Office and the NPfIT.

According to the BJHC report, Watmore, while having a high regard for the way NHS IT Director General Richard Granger structured the Programme and appointed its major contractors, has a list of key concerns that he believes to be urgently addressed.

These concerns are said to include:

• Worries that the programme is over-dependant on the late-running Care Records Spine, which creates a single point of failure in the whole system.
  
• That there is an over-reliance on key contractor BT, which has three major contracts, as provider of the Spine, LSP for London and prime contractor for the N3 broadband network.
  
• The role of suppliers outside the NPfIT contracts. Watmore is said to be concerned that GPs with EMIS systems will become a focus of agitation against NPfIT, and that the question of whether EMIS will be part of the programme must be resolved.
  
• The financial strains faced by all major suppliers under NPfIT contracts. The particular concern reported is that further delays in implementation could result in one or more of the LSPs threatening to pull out of the programme.

Watmore’s immediate priority is said to be the high profile e-booking system Choose and Book, central to the Government’s programme to offer choice to patients. The BJHC report says that NPfIT will be expected to put maximum resources into implementing interim systems until the Spine is fully functioning.

It suggests that one potential advantage of concentrating on the interim e-booking solution, which is not reliant on the Spine, would be to create a breathing space in which the Spine could be redesigned, or possibly even placed with another contractor.

Such a scenario, however, would impact the roll-out of both electronic transmission of prescriptions (ETP), due to begin imminently and the delivery schedule for core solutions by LSPs, beginning with Patient Administration System functionality connected to the Spine.

The Cabinet Office spokesperson declined to comment on any aspect of the NPfIT: "Ian Watmore doe not give running commentary on individual government IT projects".

Watmore took up the position of UK Government CIO and Head of e-Government Unit in September 2004. He was previously UK Managing Director of global management and technology services company Accenture.