True to his name, the blogger The Yorkshire Ranter has launched a fierce (and in places rather convincing) attack on  Tory plans to hand over the NHS IT plans to Google or Microsoft. His cynicism stems from the rather philosophical point that ‘the purpose of a system is what it does.’

Unlike the NHS, nobody pretends that the purpose (and by this he means real intention, rather than official stated purpose) of Google or Microsoft was ever the good health of the British nation. His argument is, therefore, that their systems won’t be designed to work towards this end, whatever they say. Google’s prime aim is to sell advertising, a point which we flagged up here at Who Sees What? when the Tories first made their proposal.

But The Yorkshire Ranter argues that targeting patients for advertising is only one possible side-effect of commercial ulterior motives.

MS products have been triumphantly successful in a couple of things – inducing people to buy ever more aftermarket security products from other American proprietary software companies, scaring them off going to the competition by making all their file formats very slightly incompatible with everything else including other versions of their own products, and generally maintaining the public belief that computers are terribly mysterious and frightening and that they must expect the experience of using them to be painful and unpleasant. This belief is very useful if you want to sell products on “user friendliness” (i.e. pretty graphics) or if you want to sell things to them in general.

Given that medicine itself is mysterious and frightening to many, this could be a disastrous combination.

Even if we did trust their intentions, though, this blogger argues that neither Google nor Microsoft possess the technical complexity necessary for such a mammoth task as the NHS database. The US models of GoogleHealth and Microsoft Health Vault are simply tools allowing patients to view their records. This is similar to the NHS’ (recently shelved) HealthSpace. But that was only one part of the NHS’ massive IT plans, which included many more services such as a national ‘Spine’ of basic information, access by researchers and a choose and book system. These potential benefits just aren’t catered for by Microsoft or Google’s model.

The Tories’ proposed ‘replacement,’ to the current NHS project, then, is no replacement at all, but equates to scrapping the whole show. Which, of course, may be just what they want to do.