Medical Device Daily Contributing Writer
And MDDs

British newspapers have seized upon comments made by an executive with Fujitsu Services (Sunnyvale, California) to lash out at delays and spending for the country's £12.4 billion ($24 billion) National Program for IT (NPfIT).

The Evening Standard reported Labour Party insiders as saying Prime Minister Tony Blair has ordered Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt to explain how the project has gone wrong.

Meanwhile a survey conducted last week by The Times of London with Doctors.net.uk showed 86% of the 3,000 participating physicians thought the project should continue, but 93% said no further investment should be made. The Times quoted the Fujitsu official, Andrew Rollerson, in its headline Feb. 13: "IT scheme for NHS 'is not working and is not going to work.'"

The Telegraph the same day covered the controversy with the headline "NHS computer system 'doomed to fail.'"

The Daily Mail cited Rollerson, a senior healthcare consultant at Fujitsu, as saying, "What we are trying to do is run an enormous program with the techniques that we are absolutely familiar with for running small projects."

The approach will not work, he said in the original report published by Computer Weekly, "unless we do some serious thinking about the challenges of scale and how you scale up to an appropriate size, then I think we are out on a limb."

The story came out of comments made by Rollerson during his presentation at a conference, "Successful Implementation of NPfIT 2007," attended by IT representatives working on what is called the "largest civilian IT project in the world."

Fitjitsu is responsible for bringing online the populous South of England, a contract valued at £896 million ($1.75 billion).

British Telecom (London) was awarded the work for London while Computer Science (El Segundo, California) is managing the "regional clusters" after Accenture (New York) quit the program in December, abandoning a £2 billion ($3.9 billion) contract for the North East and East of England.

NPfIT, entering its fifth year, seeks to create electronic health records (EHRs) for 50 million people that can be shared by 30,000 general practitioners and more than 300 hospitals over a single computer system.

The UK National Audit Office in June 2006 estimated the project is costing double the original target of £6.2 billion ($11.5 billion).

The "fat" national data spine, the basis of the EHR service, has been much-criticized for its functionality, data integrity and security.

The EHR segment of the project "is running two years behind schedule," said Computer Weekly, adding, "There are concerns about whether it is possible to achieve fully joined up systems given the size and complexity of the NHS."

Rollerson told executives at the conference there is a "gradual coming apart of what we are doing on the ground because we are desperate to get something in and make it work."

In The Times survey, an overwhelming 91% of physicians said they do not think that NPfIT will positively change the National Health Service, an expectation Rollerson confronted in his presentation.

Connecting for Health, he said, is only an IT department for the NHS. "Simply delivering an IT system," he said, will not transform the service. "Nothing could be further from the truth. A vacuum, a chasm is opening up. It was always there."

Post-market studies for OPTXX System

Novadaq Technologies (Toronto, Ontario), a developer of imaging systems for the operating room, said that post-market patient registry studies are being initiated with its CE-marked OPTTX System in Europe.

Two OPTTX Systems have been placed, one in Italy and the other in England, with a third site planned for Switzerland this quarter.

One center will focus on choroidal vessel closure (CVC) alone, while the other two will evaluate CVC effects on the need to re-treat with intra-vitreal injections of anti-VEGF drugs, evaluating both the interval between intra-vitreal injections and the total number of injections required over the duration of the study. It is anticipated that approximately 100-120 patients will be treated and followed in these registry studies.

"The OPTTX System is a minimally invasive treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration and has the potential to be a treatment of choice either as monotherapy or in combination with anti-VEGF," said Dr. Arun Menawat, president/CEO of Novadaq. "This … represents another step toward the successful commercialization of our technology platform."

Menawat said the OPTTX System "is both a diagnostic and a therapeutic tool making it potentially a convenient device of choice for retinal surgeons."

The system uses the same core imaging technology used in the company's SPY System, with optics designed for precise identification of the disease state, followed immediately by targeted treatment. The imaging capabilities also allow the surgeon to immediately confirm the effect of the treatment and thus a better understanding of the hemodynamics of the vasculature underlying the retina, the company said.

Austrian hospital orders Elektra systems

Elekta (Stockholm, Sweden), a manufacturer of advanced radiation treatment devices for cancer and brain disorders, reported an order from Landeskrankenhaus Feldkirch (Feldkirch, Austria). It includes two Elekta Synergy advanced treatment systems for intensity-modulated and image-guided radiation therapy (IMRT & IGRT), along with Mosaic, an oncology information management software package from Impac Medical Systems (Mountain View, California), an Elekta company. The total contract is valued at over 18M and includes a service contract spanning over the equipment's entire expected lifetime.

The radiation oncology department at Landeskrankenhaus Feldkirch offers radiation therapy for about 1,000 patients annually. With the late-2007 installation of the two new Elekta Synergy systems equipped with integrated high-resolution 3-D X-ray volume imaging capability for IGRT, along with advanced IMRT, the radiation oncology department in Feldkirch can now offer these methods for irradiating tumors with extremely high precision and accuracy. The initial order was booked by Elekta in January, and the installation will begin near the end of 2007.