AHLTA is Not Alone – UK NHS IT Fiasco Tops It As $17 Billion Fiasco

I had thought that DoD’s AHLTA held the record for being the world’s greatest health IT fiasco, spending $4-5 billion of taxpayer’s money on a system that was deemed Intolerable by the GAO and an Assistant Secretary of Defense.  It was so bad that it is cited as one of the leading reasons physicians are leaving military service.  One user told me, “The worst part of AHLTA is when you actually have to read some of the documentation it generates…. there is rarely a coherent statement in a 3 page clinical note.”

I knew that AHLTA would be a failure the instant I saw a diagram of it – a giant, centralized single point of failure that ignored everything that I had found successful in doing the VistA architecture.

This is not just dollars we are talking about, or missed opportunity costs.  Bad software kills people.  I don’t know if we’ll ever know how many patients AHLTA has killed, but it has to be significant.

But enough about AHLTA: I just read this article NHS IT system condemned about the UK National Health Service is in the midst of a far greater fiasco.