In many of the computing and health related management journals there are stories about the Royal Free and how many millions have been lost due to being an early adopter of the Cerner system.

One of the quotes pleased me:

"Over the coming weeks and months we will be adapting its use to the way in which our staff want the system to work to enhance the services we provide to our patients"

This sentence demonstrates a willingness to accept that actually most of these systems need to be 'worked around' and 'interpreted' by the people using it to ensure you actually get what you want (although sometimes you get what you didn't want due to the same ability to adapt the technology. Most of the NHS implementations seem to be much more deterministic - assuming that you stick the system in any Trust and you will get specific results. This has been shown to be wrong so many times, yet is still an assumption in many technology projects.

All the same, there do seem to be some real problems with the Cerner systems (and see also the comment about BT in the comment posts).

Read more about it on:

http://www.hsj.co.uk/news/2009/02/trust_blames_it_for_10m_loss.html;jsessionid=35CDA B2181FA9C98A005ACE881D9C307?tmcsTrackingInfo=$oqas EAtYhrY3-wsAvanfQYb1SYHjuTN9BgMY3ITWD9AUuXAxq_Xm8i2wLAM8ukb cBHtOxADv_-y$

Do you know first-hand about any of these implementations?