Choose and Book system fails nationally

Tags: Choose and Book Internet iS Network

12 Dec 2006

Unspecified technical problems led to Choose and Book, the NHS’s new national appointment booking service, being unavailable to users for much of yesterday.

According to service bulletins issued yesterday NHS Connecting for Health, the agency responsible for the electronic booking system: “The Choose and Book system is currently experiencing degraded service. Users of the system will experience slow responses to transactions.”

Service bulletins from yesterday stated that Atos Origin, the company responsible for delivering Choose and Book, “have identified an issue and taken resolving actions”. Choose and Book runs on software provided by Cerner.

NHS users who contacted E-Health Insider said the system was unavailable or unusable for most of Monday.

CfH bulletins confirmed that the national service was unavailable for use: “Users of the Choose and Book system may experience abnormally slow response times and failed messages.”

The latest outage raises further doubts about whether the government’s latest revised target for Choose and Book use can be hit. Originally due to be 100% in use by the end of 2005 the system is now meant to be 90% in use by the end of March 2007.

Yesterday’s failure of the national Choose and Book system follow last week’s failure of the Internet gateway to the NHS broadband network which left NHS staff unable to access online knowledge sources or even the online version or Choose and Book.

Readers Comments

Business as usual then

12 Dec 06 11:26

From your article, CfH couldn't bring themselves to agree that the system was not working.

With the dependence on the Spine and N3, the unavailability of Choose and Book to end users is far more commonplace than the centre would choose to believe.

And persuading busy GPs to keep trying, or even to give it a second chance, is not going to work.

Which explains why the targets are pie in the sky.

Root Cause

12 Dec 06 13:19

N3, C&B, Lorenzo. Downtime is practically every other day. The usual feedback given is' XXX has now resolved the issue and are investigating the root cause.' Is there a record of 'issues / problems/ risk' available to view. It would be interesting to see any patterns and audit whether there are lessons learnt or if mistakes are being missed, repeated, or resilience just not there!These are very blanket statements. Is it all tip top secret? Can we see any more info, after all we are the users or do we have to become amateur sleuths. Must dig my Miss Marple outfit out...

BMS Admin

12 Dec 06 13:23

(From where I write)it's also removed BMS Admin from users' smartcards and prevents them from doing their job.

(Post edited by EHI)

Choose and Book upgrade

wycmiv@hotmail.com

12 Dec 06 16:00

Interestingly enought choose and book was upgraded to R3.3 over the weekend . ..

Root Cause - LORENZO???????

12 Dec 06 19:09

Lorenzo - did that post mean iPM, or some other software. Lorenzo is not going to be around for a while yet (2008)?

Lorenzo

13 Dec 06 15:28

To poster 12th December at 1909.

Did you miss that iPM and iCM appear to have been 're-branded' (for marketing purposes) as 'Lorenzo' until the 'Lorenzo we thought we were getting becomes available? Yes, I know it's still the same old iPM and iCM, and you know that too, but spin is everything...