The main goal of NPfIT was to reform the governance of information in the NHS by moving England’s NHS towards a centrally controlled electronic healthcare record system that would securely connect more than 30000 GPs to 300 hospitals. Amongst its other objectives were “(enabling) the delivery of better care to patients by staff equipped with the latest information at their fingertips” 4 and to enable the patients and the public to access “the information necessary to make decisions about their own treatment and care and to influence the shape of health services generally” 5. To act upon such ambitious goals the NPfIT project would produce at the end of its life-cycle seven deliverables, five national applications and two local IT systems. The national applications were: This whole enterprise would be supported by the creation of a national IT infrastructure that involved the creation of a national broadband network for the NHS called N3, a secure email service called NHSmail, but most importantly the creation of NHS Spine, a system that would act as the platform to integrate all the systems mentioned above and would underpin the whole project. …show more content…
To this end, the project’s main deliverables were outsourced, while the rest would be procured either at a national level or at a local level against a national output-based specification (OBS) that outlined the required outputs to be provided by the contracted supplier. This sounded very promising to a great number of general practitioners and healthcare professionals, because it promised “the combination of local control with national standards” 7 and was actually very close to what NHS Trusts had been practicing for some years in regards to their individually tailored IT