Delays in the adoption of telemedicine are mainly because GPs are not interested in its broader cost benefits," said Darren Taylor, clinical services manager at LifeSign, ITS' Welsh cardiac monitoring service.
In effect, Lucent is fleshing out its call centre product portfolio and the Yankee Group quickly forecast that rivals such as Cisco, Nortel and Rockwell will soon snap up similar companies. That's about to change, as two recent examples show.
Delays with the £6.2bn NHS IT programme have been blamed on a lack of proper clinical consultation during the procurement of the systems. At the PAC hearing professor Peter Hutton, who resigned from the NHS' National Clinical Advisory Board in 2004...
Hutton referred to the clinical consultation as a "sham" that has led to the procurement of systems that don't meet clinical needs, while Nowlan said the rush to sign contracts "trumped all other aspects of consideration".
At the core of the project is the NHS Care Records Service, which is designed to replace local NHS computer systems with more integrated packages and make parts of a patient's clinical record available electronically throughout England.
NHS patients in Kent and Medway are benefiting from a broadband link with hospitals in London that enables doctors to send high-grade images such as X-rays and angiograms electronically, speeding up diagnosis and treatment.