According to numerous press reports, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt will set out a timetable for the NHS to be “paperless” by 2018 in a speech at the think-tank Policy Exchange later today. Hunt’s plans reportedly involve giving people online access to their health records by March 2015; a 12-month deadline for hospitals to computerise their records “in such a way that they can be shared”; and making all records and communication inside the NHS digital by April 2018. The speech builds on the mandate given to the new NHS Commissioning Board at the tail end of last year ‘to develop an electronic health record that works across the health and care system by 2015’.
Hunt told the Telegraph’s political correspondent: “The NHS cannot be the last man standing as the rest of the economy embraces the technology revolution.” There cannot be many people in the UK that would disagree with that statement. The fact that many hospitals still rely on piles of paper patient records that need to be moved around the hospital on trolleys is quite frankly shocking in this digital age. It’s little wonder that a report from PwC out today suggests that some £4.4bn could be put back into the NHS by proper use of ICT.
Of course, we have all been here before. The Labour government’s £12bn+ National Programme for IT in the NHS launched in 2003 was supposed to have delivered a digital NHS by 2012 (search for ‘NPfIT’ in the HotViews archive if you’re a subscriber and you want to relive the drama). Unlike previous attempts to digitise the NHS, however, there is to be no national programme, no central database and it seems no new money this time around. Local NHS organisations will be responsible for making it happen at a time when they already face the challenge of an unprecedented reorganisation of the NHS and ever tighter budgets. Some Trusts will succeed, indeed many are already investing significant sums in IT to transform the way they work (see our UK Healthcare SITS Market Trends & Forecasts report), but it’s likely that without strong central direction and additional funding many others will not. So, whilst Hunt’s vision of a “paperless” NHS is one we should all share, we fear that turning that vision into reality will be far from straightforward and meeting such an ambitious timetable next to impossible.