In July this year, we launched guidance for how trusts can achieve an integrated digital
care record and within that guidance we have provided information about how they can apply
for £260m that we've made available to help begin them on that journey.
The NHS has been on a journey towards achieving integrated digital care records for about
twenty years but the progress has been patchy.
In some areas, the clinicians are using computers, electronic records to make clinical decision-making
and we've got a good level of integration.
But in other areas, that journey towards digital record-keeping just hasn't been achieved and
clinicians are on paper and relying on paper moving around the hospital to make their decisions.
Hospitals, mental health trusts, community trusts, they need to see the value of this
for themselves.
They need to see how having digital records makes life easier for their clinicians and
actually makes things better for their patients.
But what we've realised is that by making a tech fund available, this will provide a
catalyst.
These hospitals are big, busy, there's lots of initiatives going on.
If we can help to stimulate their journey and help them with the affordability then
we're hoping that people will start to see the value of it.
Our experience has been that when hospitals start to use digital systems, they never turn
back.
It's up to trusts to decide what the best technologies are for them.
They need to balance that the clinicians like and will use the system as the most important
aspects, but also that they've got the skills either in-house or bought-in to maintain and
support the system on an ongoing basis.
There are many right ways to do this, so whether that's an enterprise-wide solution for a hospital
or indeed for a health economy, or moving towards something more like a "best of breed"
approach - there are many, many right ways to improve health and care through technology
and information services.
The important message here is that whether you're going for something that's enterprise-wide,
whether it's out of a box, whether it has any developmental requirements, or whether
you're going for something that's more of a "best of breed"/choose things incrementally
- this concept of incremental innovation - it all works.
It's all about what's the right investment decision and the right clinical decision for
each organisation to take.
But in terms of the actual systems that they choose, it's really up to them.
As long as the clinicians want to use it and it fits within an IT strategy so, for example
they've got teams that can support that technology, they know how to maintain it either themselves
or through the supplier base, then it's really up to them to decide what the best technologies
are.
The key thing is getting clinical leadership and clinical involvement, because the history
of the NHS and IT is littered with systems which are installed and are never used by
frontline clinicians and it's quite a challenge for a number of reasons.
But if you get clinicians to tell you what it is that they want, what it is that they
need to improve patient care.
Then, if you listen to them you can produce something that is workable and usable.
We have some fantastic examples of value that's been added in trusts where clinicians are
using the systems, it's improving safety, it's improving efficiency.
But the NHS doesn't talk to each other very often, so what we're doing is setting up a
Community of Practice that allows trusts to see what's happened in, for example, a neighbouring
trust or someone up the road so that they can start to understand what the journey needs
to be for them.
With regard to small medium enterprises, SMEs in particular, Intellect has over 70% of its
members are SMEs.
In the NHS there has always been a history of innovation and entrepreneurship that has
taken the NHS forward in a game-changing way in many respects.
We genuinely see an opportunity and an interest from NHS England, from the Department of Health,
and from the NHS in general, to try new opportunities, to try transformation ideas around information
and technology.
Throughout the history of the NHS, and in fact in most public services, it's those leading
edge changes, those game-changing innovations, that make the step change towards new ways
of working, towards genuinely transformational changes in health and care.
But once the information is there and electronic there are all sorts of benefits that arise.
For example, decision support.
We've been talking in the clinical community about decision support for decades now, but
it's almost impossible to do with paper notes.
However if you have the information in electronic form, then suddenly all sorts of things become
possible.
Very simple things like detecting allergies to prevent you prescribing a drug that the
patient is allergic to; or detecting what the diagnosis is and presenting the guidelines
for management to the clinician when they need it on the frontline.
Our ultimate objective is to give patients the confidence that the clinicians that are
in charge of their care have access to all the information about them and that way we're
creating a modern and safe NHS.