NHS technology: saving the health service one byte at a time

NHS technology: saving the health service one byte at a time The NHS has to make £22bn of efficiency savings by 2020 and intelligent use of IT is key in making that happen

Can technology save the NHS? That was the question addressed by a recent Guardian roundtable, supported by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), which brought together clinicians, policymakers and healthcare IT experts.

It’s a question that has some urgency. The NHS has been told to make £22bn of efficiency savings by 2020, and at least part of those savings will have to come from the intelligent use of IT. But the failure of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) – a centralised patient record system abandoned by the government in 2013 – has resulted in a decidedly patchy landscape in the NHS, where, as Jeremy Taylor, chief executive of National Voices, a patient organisation, put it: “We’ve got email, Skype, text and people having access to their own health records electronically, side-by-side with getting letters by snail mail and fax”.

It’s not all right for patients to be walking into health organisations that feel like the 1980s

Patients still prefer being visited by a nurse to plugging themselves into a machine Continue reading... The Guardian