The NHS is to appoint an IT supremo to rescue the health service's e-strategy - but may have to make the successful candidate the highest paid manager in the NHS.
Junior health minister Lord Hunt said last night that the new national IT programme director general would be "a person of the highest calibre with a depth of expertise in delivering national IT projects".
Industry insiders expect that the NHS will have to pay at least £200,000 to attract a top ranking IT specialist from the private sector - and even this is regarded as a conservative figure by some pundits.
At £200,000 the IT director will be one of the highest paid public servants in the UK - his or her salary dwarfing that of the NHS chief executive, Nigel Crisp, (£160,000) and the health secretary, Alan Milburn (£124,979).
The advertisement for the job, published this week, describes it as "a Herculean task [that]... will demand an individual of extraordinary talent and experience."
It is coy about salary, it promises "an impressive package" but states: "We are, quite simply, seeking the very best available deliverer of large scale IT programmes in the UK."
Lord Hunt announced the plan to appoint the IT expert at his launch of the latest revision of the NHS IT strategy at the annual conference of the Association of IT Staff (Assist) in the NHS, in Birmingham yesterday.
Previous NHS IT projects, he said, had a "mixed record". He blamed past fiascos on "a lack of unequivocal leadership on IT".
Responsibility for the NHS's billion-pound annual spending on IT is split between the NHS information policy unit in Leeds and the NHS information authority in Birmingham and with individual trusts, which can decide largely what systems to buy.
"I can't think of any other national or corporate organisation that would approach IT in the fragmented and piecemeal manner that we have over the past four years," Lord Hunt said.
The IT director general's main responsibility will be driving a new four point "implementation plan", which is due to begin in April 2003.
This will create
· Electronic booking of appointments
· Electronic ordering of prescriptions
· A shared electronic health record
· A national common IT infrastructure.
All are due to be reality by 2005 - a tall order by the standards of previous national computer schemes.
One potential obstacle is money: officials have said the plan will need £5bn on top of existing IT budgets.
Lord Hunt said that the Department of Health is still "divvying up" the new cash promised in the Budget, and could not say how much would go to IT.
Another obstacle is the time taken to procure the systems. It normally takes at least two years to procure a system for the NHS. "We will have to sort that out," Lord Hunt said.
The new IT plan is the third since Labour came to power. But Lord Hunt claimed that it represents continuity from the first strategy, Information for Health, published in 1998.
One of that strategy's targets, for electronic patient records in hospitals, has been quietly dropped. This is largely because of the widening gap between the handful of hospitals that have managed to computerise and the rest that have not.
The new emphasis is on bringing every NHS organisation up to a basic standard. This will be the responsibility of the 28 new strategic health authorities created in the latest reforms.
"What I am not going to have is a small number of trusts in each strategic health authority holding up progress because they can't come to decisions," Lord Hunt said.
