In excess of 30,000 health service staff, including some 3,500 GPs, are now using the NHS care records data spine being developed under the £6bn Connecting for Health (CfH) programme.

In its annual report marking two years since the programme to digitise the NHS began, CfH says it has made significant progress.

?Even though we are only two years into this massive undertaking, we estimate that more than two million people - patients, doctors and other NHS professionals - have already been helped by new systems delivered by the National Programme for IT,? writes Richard Granger, director general for NHS IT.

Specific successes highlighted in the report include the first electronic prescriptions, broadband access for some 350,000 users across 7,500 sites, and the deployment of 16 patient administration systems.

The report also stresses the success of additional services, such as the 124,000 users of the Contact secure email and directory system, and the 20,000 users of the Quality Management and Analysis System that provides GPs and health trusts with feedback on the quality of care delivered to patients.

?It is against a backdrop of strategic under-investment in IT, supply chain weakness, and a heterogeneous user-base, that the programme was conceived,? said Granger.

?Despite these obstacles, the progress we have achieved has exceeded expectations.?

The report also says that centralised deals struck by CfH with suppliers such as Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems and HP will save the health service an estimated £3.8bn over 10 years.

But CfH has also experienced some problems. There have been delays with the electronic bookings service, stability problems with the data spine and all five regional implementations are running behind schedule.

Last month Fujitsu Services, CfH prime contractor for the South, dropped IDX, one of its key sub-contractors.