In a speech to the Conservative party's spring conference in Cheltenham on 26 April 2009, Cameron heavily criticised NHS Connecting for Health, saying the Conservatives would have used a decentralised approach to health records.
"Labour say: let's call in the expensive consultants. Let's commission a massive IT project. Let's make the state more powerful with a new, centralised computer to store everyone's health records," said Cameron.
"We would have said: today, you don't need a massive central computer to do this. People can store their health records securely online, they can show them to whichever doctor they want. They're in control, not the state."
"And when they're in control of their own health records, they're more interested in their health, so they might start living more healthily, saving the NHS money," Cameron added. "But best of all in this age of austerity, a web-based version of the government's bureaucratic scheme services like Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault cost virtually nothing to run."
"So this is where some really big savings could be made," he added, talking of "replacing whole chunks of the expensive, bureaucratic government machine with more modern methods - for a tiny fraction of the cost".
Cameron used Connecting for Health as an example of what he considered was wrong with government spending. "From the £90,000 wasted on pot plants in the Department of Transport to over twelve billion wasted on the NHS computer they don't think twice about splashing your cash," he told his audience.
Cameron also repeated his intention to scrap identity cards and ContactPoint, as "extensions of the state that do more harm than good and which Britain would be better off without".
He said the government should cut them immediately, adding that their cancellation represented "easy choices for Conservatives".
Cameron also announced a Conservative government would publish details of state spending and salaries online, through what he called the "People's Right to Know" plan. It would publish every item of government spending worth more than £25,000 online, whether local or national, and all public sector salaries of more than £150,000.
