If you go into your GP practice nearly all of the interactions that you have with them
they will put into a technological system, an electronic record, and that will all be
recorded and all the processes and everything behind that is all done digitally.
That is a fantastic achievement and it is not something in the NHS we are very good
at recognising as a system.
What has been less of a success is what we call in the system private provider digitisation.
So that’s hospitals.
Often hospitals, community trust, mental health trusts getting them all digital and all on
a similar system where they can all talk to one another and what we’re aiming for in
hospitals is what we call an electronic patient record and it would mean that there was a
single source of truth on every patient that comes in through the door.
In terms of sharing that data further, so sharing between general practice and hospitals,
sharing between hospitals and out of hours, all of those kinds of things, we are nowhere
near where we need to be right now.
Actually, there have been many different schemes within the NHS to try and get it digitised.
So National Programme for IT was infamous, it was in the 2000s, it tried to do this digitisation
of providers and it largely failed because it was overly centralised and to be honest
it was incredibly poorly run.
Actually, if you look at estimates of failed IT programmes in the NHS before National Programme
for IT, some estimates put that as high as 60%.
I think that’s remarkable and it just shows how difficult it is to do digital transformation
in an organisation where the workforce numbers one million and which has over a £100 billion
spent on it every year.
If you skip forward to 2016, Jeremy Hunt made a commitment to £4.2 billion for investing
in technology in the NHS, and much of that was to go towards this digitisation of providers
problem.
I think the overarching goal was that by 2020 we would be paperless.
It’s still not going to happen, I don’t think we’ve seen an official postponement
of that target, but paperless 2020 always looked a bit optimistic.
Now we’re talking about 2023, probably.
So the global digital exemplar programme was set up to support this.
Global digital exemplars, the GDE programme is the current programme that NHS England,
NHS Digital are pursuing with local providers to pick winners essentially, to say okay we
think that you’ve got a high level of digital maturity, so we’re going to match fund it
and help you invest and help you then spread the learning that you have from implementing
an electronic patient record in your hospital.
We’re going to help you blueprint that, understand what it is that made that implementation
successful and then help you spread it.
Why is it so important that we digitise?
And why is it that electronic patient records tend to be the main focus at the moment?
So I think partly that’s where the national focus is.
It’s where there’s a lot of money going, electronic patient records are incredibly
expensive.
They often lead to falls in productivity after they’ve been implemented and because they’re
really, really complex and you’re getting staff to work in ways that they’ve never
had to work before, but they are very attractive to providers at the moment, and they’re
very attractive for, I’ve picked out four reasons here, there are more reasons than
this but here’s four reasons that I think are really important.
Firstly, it’s about more reliable communication between clinicians so you don’t end up losing
bits of paper, handwriting of doctors is a really big thing for nurses because they can
never understand what any of it says, and I think it’s an ongoing battle to interpret
a doctor’s handwriting.
That takes that out of the equation.
There’s also potential for communication, greater communication between the clinician
and the patient and empowering the patient which don’t go into as much detail about
but it’s a really important feature that’s starting to be realised.
Now in terms of improving quality of care, there’s not that much great evidence that
an electronic patient record in itself does that, but there is good evidence that stuff
you plug into an electronic patient record can help you with that.
So, if you are collecting data in real time about different patients, what some areas
are trying to do is say, well hey why don’t we take some of that and create early warning
systems.
Then there are two other things which my two icons on the right, which are about analytics
and research.
We currently know very little about what goes on in hospitals, and what we do know is not
particularly reliable.
Electronic patient records give managers and researchers a level of understanding of what’s
going on that they never previously had and again it’s hard to say exactly where the
benefits are going to come from here but they will come because having better information
is really important for people doing analytics and people doing research.