Wednesday 04 September 2024
Statement under Rule 10(3)
Thank you, Madame,
I'm grateful to you to allow me to update the Assembly on one of the Committee for Health & Social Care's most complex programmes, the Electronic Patient Record programme, or EPR for short.
Members will be aware that implementing a new IT system in a health and care environment was always going to be a challenge and this is evidenced in other jurisdictions. In my May statement I advised that it was likely that the Committee would need to extend the go live date for the first stage into 2025. I also noted that further work to understand the implications of this change, including the potential impact on costs needed to be understood.
From the most recent review, it is clear that it will take longer and will cost more should the scope of works and rigor remain unchanged.
The current budget for the programme is £17.31 million, which was reduced on best advice at the time, from an original cost envelope in May 2020 of c£20m. This will now need to increase to around £22.2 million to complete the programme. The currently agreed funding envelope with an optimism bias of only 2% is in hindsight far too low for such a complex IT programme.
The implementation period for the first stage is now forecast to be by the end of June 2025, with further stages complete by end of June 2026.
This timeline has increased because of the inherent complexity of the programme, and this in turn has resulted in additional costs because there is more work to do than originally anticipated. Some examples driving costs unforeseen in the business case, forecast to be £4.9m, are:
- The original premise for this programme was that we would be able to recruit the necessary skills required to deliver the whole programme but this has proven to be a challenge, as Members will be aware from the additional information on EPR provided to them in April 2024. We have been unsuccessful in attracting all the staff with the requisite skills and experience and hence we have had to employ those within private consultancies to ensure the successful completion of this programme. Approximately £1.8m of the increased costs result from having to rely on external consultancies.
- We are working with our partner, Agilisys, to progress the additional engineering and programme management works needed around the data centre/IT infrastructure which will cost an estimated £0.6m.
- And lastly, extending the programme team and use of external suppliers over this longer period, is estimated to add approximately £2.5m.
Some of these figures are subject to change and commercial negotiation, and there is an element of contingency costs.
There are similarities with the OHM P2 in that they are both large, complex programmes and they were always going to be difficult and challenging to manage.
We now find ourselves in a difficult position having made the decision to replace the old system, which will not be fully supported in the future and which cannot deliver the required benefits, in a limited marketplace and being subscale we have little choice but to continue with the modernisation. The Committee has looked at alternatives but none are palatable. We do not wish to reduce the testing, or reduce the scope for fear that we will not get the benefits of this digital transformation.
The Committee received this information on the 13th of August and have kept Policy & Resources Committee fully advised, updating them at their meeting on the 27th of August.
We will of course keep the Assembly advised and we will be working closely with Policy & Resources Committee regarding the funding issue.
Thank you, Madame.