Paperless NHS could free £4 billion for patient care
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced that
going paperless would save the NHS £4billion, improve services and help meet the
challenges of an ageing population.
These benefits include: savings of over £4billion, freeing up professionals’ time to spend caring for patients, and giving patients more options alongside visiting a surgery in person.
The Health Secretary outlined the following advances which could be made:
- Secure online health records - enabling individuals to access data held about them easily
- Paperless referrals – instead of sending a letter when referring a patient, the GP could send an email to the hospital they are referring the patient to
- Secure linking up of electronic health and care records plus the ability for records to ‘follow individuals’ (with their consent) throughout the NHS or social care system – ensuring that all medical and care professionals involved in a patient’s care have access to their medical history and can easily but securely share knowledge across the system to improve the care a patient receives
“The NHS cannot be the last man standing as the rest of the economy embraces the technology revolution. It is crazy that ambulance drivers cannot access a full medical history of someone they are picking up in an emergency – and that GPs and hospitals still struggle to share digital records.
“Previous attempts to crack this became a top down project akin to building an aircraft carrier. We need to learn those lessons – and in particular avoid the pitfalls of a hugely complex, centrally specified approach. Only with world class information systems will the NHS deliver world class care.”
Comments
Now we can print forms from a printer that does 100 A4 sheets a minute. Can you think of an office that orders less paper now than it did in the 70's? - even every single sheet of paper seems to get photocopied 10 times over.
sure people do a lot of work on the screen, then they print 3 copies for each person who is attending that afternoons meeting. E-mail and networked info does help pass along information, but the first thing people seem to do is print it and stick it in a file, Thing is because we can pass much more information, its only more information that people want to print off.
There will obviously be some circumstances when it is very necessary to check the identity of a patient or someone claiming to be their relative, as the recent dreadful outcome of a prank call from an Aussie radio station which appears to have caused the suicide of a nurse demonstrates only too clearly.
In those circumstances the patiemt or relative should probably have to produce ID.
However, do we really need a massive bureaucratic check every time someone drops into their GP surgery for a routine checkup?
There ought to be a sensible balance in such matters. And even when a rigorous ID check is necessary, a lot of the work associated with it can and should be computerised, saving time and money and probably being at least a effective as a paper system.
A certain amount of healthy scepticism is always appropriate with big public sector IT problems because so many of them have gone wrong in the past. I personally have a preference for specific one-at-a-time improvement projects with a very clear scope and objectives rather than "reinvent the world" big projects which have so much more to go wrong. But that doesn't mean Jeremy Hunt isn't right to see potential for improvements in patient care through replacing paperwork with computers if the spec. is well designed and implemented.
Certainly back in the late eighties and early nineties my experience of the early impact of computerisation exactly matched yours. The idea of the "paperless office" was a standing joke to me and my colleagues back then.
Yes, I remember using high capacity printers to print off large number of copies of the documents I wrote, I remember people who printed hard copies of all their emails, I remember large filing cabinets stuffed with computer printout. I am sure that our offices used three times as much paper in the early 90s as they had in the 70s.
But my memories of working that way are twenty years old.
None of them reflect my experience now - fortunately for the planet, because if we printed out a set of hard copies of every draft of every document we write these days, the company I work for would get though enough paper to wipe out hundreds of acres of forest every week!
The team I work in, and most of the other management teams in the company, produce the vast majority of our work in electronic form, which is shared on our computers. Ihe large documents and presentations we write usually go through several drafts - more than ten is not unusual - but we don't print out even the final drafts, never mind the working ones.
In face-to-face meetings they are projected onto a screen: during conference calls we throw the documents onto each other's computer screens.
When I moved my main place of work to Whitehaven Telephone exchange in about 2006 I didn't bother to install a printer in my new office. I have not missed one as I hardly ever need to print anything for work purposes and I don't get sent much paperwork in hard copy form either. The only regular chore requiring hard copies is sending off receipts for travel and other expenses when claiming the costs back - and even then the claims are made electronically (and vetted much more carefully than those for MPs apparently used to be.)
I don't think this necessarily means that BT is more efficient than Sellafield, I think it means that BT is further down a road which almost every company is travelling. I suspect it won't be too long before Sellafield, the NHS, and most other organisations in Britain used paper a lot less than they do now.
Mind you, I wouldn't take too many bets against Copeland Council being one of the last!