Key parts of the Government’s flagship £12.7bn NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) are on the brink of failure, warns a powerful cross-party group of MPs.

The Commons public accounts committee (PAC) said recent progress in deploying a new care records system to hospitals across England was “very disappointing”, according to reports in The Guardian.

The NHS is currently forecasting a completion date of 2014-15 for its care records system – four years later than originally planned. But the MPs said even this revised schedule looks over-optimistic.

The committee said: “The programme is not providing value for money at present . . . Unless the position on care records system deployments improves appreciably in the very near future (i.e. within the next six months), the Department of Health should assess the financial case for allowing [hospital] trusts to put forward applications for central funding for alternative systems.”

The system has the potential to connect GPs and hospitals to ensure NHS staff have access to the patient data they need to make timely and informed clinical decisions, and improving the quality of care delivered.

Giving NHS staff better access to data is a keystone to improving clinical processes and patient outcomes.

But how long should we reasonably expect to wait for the system to be in place, and at what cost?