How the Brits Do Health and IT

This is interesting:

Britain's best-paid civil servant is to quit as the head of NHS information technology, claiming the new, accident-prone computer system is on track.

Richard Granger, the chief executive of Connecting for Health, said he would leave the post, and its £290,000-a-year salary, in October. "There is no doubt about the programme's achievability," said Mr Granger, who took up the role in October 2002. "Most of the building blocks are now in place."

Karen Jennings, the head of health at Unison, the NHS's biggest trade union, said Mr Granger's optimism was at odds with the views of the "majority of NHS staff".

She said: "Technically... things are finally coming together. But lessons must be learned from the way these over-ambitious, big-bang IT projects have been brought in late and so over-budget."

Parts of the project are two years behind schedule and it may now cost a total of £20 billion, which would put it £7 billion over budget.

Mr Granger can point to some successes. An electronic patient-booking service now arranges 20,000 appointments a day and 250 million X-ray images are now stored electronically.

Several things--the guy was the highest paid civil servant. By automating the National Health Service, Britain brings all the advantages and weaknesses of centralized IT to health care, including the problems of doing a big big project. On the other hand, while $40 billion is a bigger project than anything the US government has done, at least outside the military, they appear to have had better success than the FBI has.