NHS embarks on its digital transformation: Where do you start?
NHS has paper-based systems, multiple technologies and needs a data architecture. ZDNet UK Editor in Chief Steve Ranger talks about the moving parts and the challenges getting the NHS ready for innovation in the future.
In 1948, the height of computing technology was a computer named Baby, housed at the University of Manchester. This technological marvel was the first machine to run a computer program: a feat of engineering 17 lines long. In the same year, another innovation came into being: the National Health Service, an organisation designed to give healthcare to anyone who needed it, entirely free.
Now, 70 years later, both computing and the NHS have moved on more than their original developers could ever have imagined. Today, can tech give the NHS the jump start it needs?
This year has already seen the release of two key reports that will guide the NHS’ tech strategy for years to come: the smartly titled Long Term Plan, setting out the health service’s policy for the next 10 years with IT playing a central role, and the Topol Review, detailing how staff should be prepped to be able to use all the new technologies that the next decade brings.
Like any large organisation faced with financial pressures – in particular inadequate funding in the face of rising demand for its services – the NHS is looking towards technology to help drive efficiencies and cut costs. The Long Term Plan sets out a number of aims, including improving out-of-hospital care, reducing pressure on emergency services, patients having more control over their own data and personalized care, increasing provision of digital health services, and better population health.
SEE: Digital transformation: A CXO’s guide (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)
While NHS IT has been subject to several overarching plans over the years – most notably the National Programme for IT – with varying degrees of success, the Long Term Plan is different in that’s driven by trends in consumer IT: both patients and staff are used to using increasinlgy nimble devices and services, which they now expect the NHS to embrace.
“I do think we’re making progress… People are paying a lot of more attention to this, and in some way this must be driven by what’s happening in the rest of people’s lives – they’ve got iPhones in their pockets that are more powerful than the computers they’re using. I think it does feel like that’s different from the when National Programme for IT was around – there is a different attitude towards these kinds of IT. I do like to think we turned a bit of a corner around National Programme for IT, and the approach that’s being taken today is a qualitatively different one to the one that’s taken back then,” says Harry Evans, a researcher at health charity and think tank the King’s Fund.
The Long Term Plan is, at its heart, optimistic about the transformative power of technology, painting a beautiful picture of how things could be, without detailing the scale of the work that lies ahead.
“The NHS is a hotbed of innovation and technological revolution in clinical practice,” it says. That might be true, but it’s also a hotbed of outdated technology: one where faxes, ransomware, pagers, and paper notes are still all too common.
“Digital and technology are quite important enablers to the wider ambitions for the Long Term Plan, thinking about more joined-up integrated care systems, the ability for data sharing to really support that, population health and [disease] prevention,” says Rachel Hutchings, policy researcher for think tank the Nuffield Trust. “It’s clear that digital is quite high on the health policy agenda, and I think that’s really positive. There definitely is that capacity and buy-in to do that, it’s just about making sure it’s implemented in the right way.”
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