EmailConnelly told the annual conference of the Association for Informatics Professionals in Health and Social Care (Assist) that there are no interdependencies between community health trusts and acute trusts. As a result, CfH "will licence a product as fast as we can" for community trusts.
"We think our approach in the south is designed to give us a bit more pace than if we had looked for a single local service provider," she told the Assist event, held at the NEC in Birmingham on 4 June 2009.
The south of England has lacked a single local service provider since Fujitsu was removed from the role last year. Earlier this week, the Department of Health said that BT will receive more than £500m for supporting major software deployments at 12 acute and 25 community and mental health trusts in the region. However, it will not become the area's sole provider, a role it takes in London.
Connelly said that the NHS's new focus on quality, which follows from Lord Darzi's Next Stage review, is intended to improve patient safety, effectiveness of treatment and patients' experiences. But she added that it should also improve productivity, helping the health service to deal with the economic slowdown.
Research on software design shows that a focus on quality "drives a lot of waste out of the system," Connelly explained, such as through not having to spend time correcting mistakes. "It costs less and you do it quicker."
She encouraged the audience to innovate in informatics, while sounding a note of caution: "We'll never use a bleeding edge technology in informatics, because of what is at stake," she said. "If you were in financial services, you would talk about your risk envelope in a different way. Our risk envelope is about people."
But this should not hold back innovation: "I do think we need to get faster, and we need to get simpler" about introducing systems, Connelly said. "We need to spend a lot of energy and effort working in multi-disciplinary teams with the people who are going to make use of the systems we develop," but this process has to take place swiftly, and allow adaptations during development.
She added that while standardisation of systems and processes was often beneficial, it was not essential that the NHS had a single way of doing something. She said she would rather see two or three options, with organisations choosing what worked best for them, rather than a long wait for a single solution.
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