Multiple billions, actually.

After ten years, England's Department of Health is scraping its project to install a national electronic health record into the massive National Health System.

According to the article in The Guardian from London, the secretary of health Andrew Lansley stated:

"Labour's IT programme let down the NHS and wasted taxpayers' money by imposing a top-down IT system on the local NHS, which didn't fit their needs. We will be moving to an innovative new system driven by local decision-making. This is the only way to make sure we get value for money from IT systems that better meet the needs of a modernised NHS."

We were struck by not only the size of the flushed project, but by the significant shift from a top-down, dictated answer to an approach that favors local decision making.

We wonder if there are lessons for this side of the pond, lessons that would be good to learn before someone spends billions of tax payer dollars.