Laura Hughes / Financial Times: NHS doctors warn of safety risks from an outdated IT infrastructure, as the UK government plans to digitize the world’s largest publicly funded health service — Plans to digitise health service must first tackle ‘flip a coin’ nature of equipment across UK, say medical staff
I work in the NHS and I can attest to the problems of the outdated infrastructure.
However the biggest problem is easily the lack of standardisation across the NHS. It’s split into 100s of NHS trusts running hospitals and 1000s of GP practices, and many have their own individual software systems.
It’s gotten a little better in recent years with some regional purchasing to some extent but it’s still a mess.
Where I live, one big trust procured a top of the line EPR and the neighbouring trusts have all got individual old systems that don’t work with it. There is no single patient record yet patients move between trusts all the time.
The NHS needs to coordinate it IT better. Instead of trusts buying their own EPR (electronic patient records), the NHS needs to procure on a national or regional scale.
The same issues happen with PACs (picture archiving systems for storing the images such as radiology), RIS (radiology information systems for storing information about radiology) and Pathology systems.
But the single biggest thing government could do is stop stealing the capital budget (the money set aside each year for investing in buildings and IT). NHS trusts are forced to set this money aside for future investment in estates and IT but the tories have used it every year for the last 10 years to pay for day to day operational costs. That is why hospitals are crumbling and infrastructure is out of date. Financial mismanagement has been imposed from the top down so the Gov can say “we’ve put billions more into the NHS”. Instead a large chunk of that has been sleight of hand lies and it’s built up the mess we have now. They have literally mugged Peter to pay Paul.
I have little faith Wes Streeting and labour will be any different.
Sort of off topic but I thought PACs was part of radiology. What’s the difference between PAC and RIS? I should know this stuff, my company provides first level support for medical systems in the US.