EmailHealth minister Mike O'Brien said on 9 December 2009 that the department "will take some time to judge progress against all of the criteria and we are currently reviewing all of the outcomes in order to decide the best way forward".
The department issued criteria on 29 October against which it said the two local service providers would be judged by the end of November.
The response, in answer to a parliamentary written question from the minister's Conservative shadow Stephen O'Brien, came in a week which saw chancellor Alistair Darling apparently announce the scrapping of the £12.7bn National Programme for IT, before health minister Andy Burnham confirmed fairly modest cuts of £600m from its total cost.
The £600m reduction in the programme's lifetime cost, spread over several years, makes up a proportion of £500m the chancellor cut from government IT programmes in his pre-budget report on 9 December.
Mike O'Brien also told Parliament that NHS trusts using iSoft's Lorenzo software have 453 live issues logged against it as of 1 December. "Many of the open issues are of low business impact, and there is a rolling schedule to resolve them in line with trusts' priorities," he said.
His colleague Phil Hope revealed that maintaining the Department of Health's website cost £2.84m in 2008-09, with similar costs next year.
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