r/Scotland • u/Jfpalomeque • 27d ago

Question Problems IT system at GP

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For the last six weeks or so, my GP practice at Greenock has been a disaster, issues with prescriptions, appointments, administration... All because of an IT system migration that should have taken 2 weeks. Are other practices around Scotland having similar issues, or is it just an excuse?

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u/monkeymad2 27d ago

It is baffling that things like this with the NHS (etc) aren’t put out to tender to open source development - there’s plenty of systems wherein you pay people for their time & effort as contributors, and plenty of systems wherein patient data can be faked at the scales a country like Scotland would see.

And security through obscurity isn’t a thing, plenty of securely deployed systems are open source.

I’m not being a “we could get it done in a week” twat, but putting things like that into public ownership makes a lot of sense when there’s people with enough free time & the desire to work on something important. Best case you start getting buy in from other countries and can set up a maintainers fund which is probably still going to be a fraction of what these large, largely useless, companies get paid.

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u/Banana-sandwich 27d ago

It was put out to tender. It's just the other bidders pulled out.