The NHS National Programme for IT is one of the biggest and riskiest IT projects (estimated at £2.3bn) the UK has ever seen, and it will have far-reaching effects on the delivery (or non-delivery) of public healthcare for some time to come.

It has now launched a corporate web site to explalin what it is doing, and Kablenet reports that it is to spawn a new body to consult with patients and health professionals about crucial issues such as patitent records and bookng systems.

There has surely never been a more difficult challenge for the idea of user experience design, and I sincerely hope it succeeds because we will all suffer if it fails. It is far too early to judge, but the NPfIT is already showing some gaps, and the vagiaries of large-scale procurement at this level means that most work has so far been gobbled up by large corporations who are not always the most user-centric bodies. I expect this to change as the user experience challenge becomes clearer over time.