Essentially, different healthcare systems have different needs which are reflected in how their electronic health record systems are architected. For example, EHRs in the US are optimized for billing, and if you're moving an US-centric EHR, like Epic, to a country like Denmark with universal healthcare, all that functionality becomes superfluous. Not to mention the language differences, as well, which are touched upon in the article. It's possible that similar concerns played into the NHS's decision to build their own system. Some NHS trusts are moving forward with their own Epic implementations, however. For example: https://www.digitalhealth.net/2018/06/royal-devon-exeter-nhs...
I said it must have been interesting, lots to learn about. She replied that the NHS was the best in the world and there was nothing to learn about from anyone else in any respect.
Sadly, although I remain convinced many people must be slogging against the system, I suspect she isn't alone in that view.
The current Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care is pushing open standards and interoperability, but has an idealogical attachment to private companies providing software after competitive tender.
Which is silly given who actually owns large parts of British infrastructure but... We have a confluence of shitty corrupt middle managers masquerading as politicians and a terrible press.
I honestly have come to the conclusion that the UK is pretty fucked in the mid to long term.
We put a config flag in to switch between the two models they were going back and forth between and just twiddled it every week for months. There was some set charge every time they did it. They had the opposite problem with anything that actually mattered where they couldn't make a decision at all. Some of that software is still running in hospitals 10+ years later with apparently little change since the the NPfIT died.
I moved out of the healthcare domain shortly after that. A few years ago I tried to sell some software for next to nothing to the NHS for a team my wife worked for. A simple webapp backed by a DB instead of spreadsheets on a shared drive. They took the idea and gave it to an in house employee who was running it as a side project (charging more for it than I was) and never finished building it.
Speaking to someone in charge of innovation for a large part of the country recently, he said he couldn't even take some software I'd offered for a free trial. As he saw it the system was so broken he was warning everyone off. And his job was innovation.
The NHS is ripe for improvement. I suspect its management haven't got a clue what they're doing though and fear the lure of big tech firms will be the only thing they can't resist.