interesting debate 4 Mar 2015 09:56
Mention the letters ‘I’ and ‘T’ in the same sentence as ‘N’, ‘H’ and ‘S’ and the response in government circles is likely to be a sharp intake of breath. Add ‘National Programme’ to your verbal montage and the result could well be much more dramatic, not to say angry.
Put simply, computers are something of a tricky topic in the health service. Thanks to the perceived failure of the high-profile National Programme for IT (NPfIT), largely resulting from the difficulty of achieving interoperability between the vast array of organisations and bodies that exist under the healthcare umbrella, it’s a subject around which it pays to tread lightly.
That needn’t aver against an honest appraisal of the potential for IT to improve healthcare provision, however, as a recent CSW round table revealed. The event was sponsored by the technology company Dell, and offered NHS workers including GPs, hospital consultants, practice managers and CCG members a chance to assess the potential of digital and data in transforming, enhancing and reimagining healthcare.
Healing the wound
“Digital and information is clearly something of an open wound for the NHS,” opined Richard Vize, a consultant at CSW’s parent company Dods who chaired the debate. Even so, he said, the Five Year Forward View maps a new era, engendering a “much more permissive approach to health policy development, allowing [for] a wider range of care models, local care structures and financial flows.”
This reflects a sense of both the strengths and the failings of the NPfIT. After all, the case for greater connectivity between healthcare providers retains its force, despite the difficulty experienced in implementing it. But recognition that the Programme’s top-down method was unsatisfactory explains the sensitivity to local contexts seen in the Five Year Forward View.
“Essentially,” said Vize, “NHS England is making a clear demarcation in role between different areas [of healthcare]. There is a central spine and infrastructure that’s needed for digital records to work, and [allowance for] local solutions and innovations within a structured approach to enable connectivity.”
If the approach works, it will no doubt be greeted warmly by those within the health sector, and could change wider attitudes towards NHS IT. What’s more, and despite the bruising experiences of recent years, there’s a clear appetite for further innovation in Information Technology, as a recent survey conducted by Dell and Dods Research revealed.
The headline finding from the survey is easily expressed: namely, that 65 per cent of the senior healthcare managers who responded to the research believe IT within their organisation to be insufficient. This reflects a yearning for improvement in the sector, based upon experience of the efficiencies already g
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