A £50 MILLION NHS computer system which was meant to unify patient records has been scrapped by the Scottish Government after a decade of failure.
The eCare system was meant to bring together patient records from the NHS and social services departments but never worked properly. It is finally to be abandoned this summer after a series of audits showed it was failing.
It was first introduced in 2001 and successive governments, both Labour-LibDem coalitions and latterly the SNP, tried without success to make it work.
Tory health spokesman Jackson Carlaw said it had been remark-able how successive administrations had allowed such a wasteful project to "trundle on" for so long.
He said: "Alarm bells should have been ringing long before now, but these warnings have been wilfully ignored."
The system was introduced by French IT firm Atos, which is at the centre of controversial disability benefit tests. A series of audits and reviews revealed the system's repeated failings and the plug will finally be pulled this summer, when its costs will have topped £50m.
A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: "In 2011 we recognised the 10-year-old eCare IT system was reaching the end of its productive life and delivering only very limited value, and as a result funds were switched to better approaches."
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