News

’Free’ GP computers crash

Just as the internal market in the NHS began to trade two computer companies demonstrated just how fragile medical markets can be. Value Added Medical Products (VAMP) and AAH Meditel have been supplying general practitioners with “free” computer hardware and specialist software in return for regular doses of anonymous data about patients seen and drugs prescribed. The companies buy the data and the doctors use the money to pay for their new computers. The data are sold by the computer companies to pharmaceutical companies, who use the information to match the medicines they produce to uncommon side-effects that can only be spotted by seeing what happens when thousands of people take a particular product.

For the first few years this trading in information went well, and the companies prospered. As the demand for data from the pharmaceutical industry began to decline, sales of data stopped covering the costs of buying it from the GPs tied to the computer companies. Suddenly the computer companies announced that GPs could no longer enjoy this trade and would have to forgo the regular exchange of cash for data.

The doctors had little choice but to agree. The alternative was to forgo their expensive equipment and find a replacement, or pay its real cost, and most have not taken these paths. This crisis is over, for alternative sources of capital have been found to support the now restructured computer companies, but the stability of commercial organisations supplying specialist computer systems for the NHS. What would happen if a company supplying the data systems needed by the hospitals — who must now account for every patient — were to collapse?

The Department of Health’s decision in the early eighties to let competition sort out the best computer systems for general practice, rather than develop a single UK standard based on ‘G-Pass’ — a system widely used in Scotland and Northern Ireland — has left the NHS with a multiplicity of suppliers and systems. Their future no longer looks so certain.