Welsh IT chief reveals SCR concerns

Speaking at an international conference on the implementation of electronic health records on 26 October 2010, Martin Murphy said that when Wales started to develop its own Individual Health Record (IHR), he wanted to move away from the English model. "We wanted to create as individual a health record as we could. We wanted to separate it out and put some clear red water between us and what England were doing because we were very concerned early on about the governance side of the information," he told the event, organised by Edinburgh University. He said that Wales had got it right because it did proper research and participated in a lot of debates "about how to do it properly". "And we learnt a lot from that. If you don't get your information governance right to begin with, nothing else actually happens," Murphy added. He also suggested that organisations within the English NHS had lost control of the implementation of electronic records. "My contention is in other places, not too far from here, you're not actually in control of your architecture anymore," said Murphy. Buying "big beautiful systems" may not be the way to go, he added, stating that striking the right balance between vendor and NHS involvement was key to implementing an effective electronic patient record system. Murphy continued: "We didn't buy systems, we wanted a series of information services that could be strapped together and basically divided across the whole of the health service and that's a different concept." He also pointed out that such systems should be built in a "controlled and safe fashion", not rushed to meet unrealistic deadlines. "The first thing is, design the systems built on the business processes, not on the current organisational boundary," he explained. "Your systems have to pass, as I call them, two reorganisation tests. If you're actually building something that is not permanently needed two or three reorganisations from now, then you're probably working on the wrong thing." Earlier this month NHS Wales announced that Adastra, Emis, iSoft and InPractice Systems had signed agreements to provide the technical software that will make the IHR available to doctors working out of hours. The £4.7m IHR is a key part of Informing Healthcare, a Welsh Assembly Government programme to modernise the NHS.