In April, Christine Connelly, the Department of Health's director general of informatics, said that the National Programme for IT's suppliers had to make significant progress on providing hospitals with systems by the end of November.
"If we don't see significant progress by the end of November 2009, then we will move to a new plan for delivering informatics to healthcare," she said.
On 30 October, the DoH said it will use the following criteria to judge suppliers' progress next month:
- All modules of the relevant product must be ratified as complete
- It will have to have passed a series of tests, including being ready for operation and scalability
- Its first deployments in trusts will have been judged an initial success by the organisations in question, based on deployment criteria published in advance
- Suppliers will be "required to develop a deployment plan that assumes success at the end of November"
- iSoft specifically must have an "agreed milestone plan on track" for an implementation at an acute trust by March 2010.
The National Programme has been heavily criticised for its slowness in providing patient record systems for hospitals, a plan which is at least four years behind its original schedule.
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