07 Apr 2011
Secretary of state for health Andrew Lansley told an audience at the HC2011 conference on Tuesday that the "information revolution" proposed by his white paper and the subsequent Health and Social Care Bill will reduce costs across the NHS by 20 per cent.
Lansley also explained that the move to make patient data available was part of the wider government drive towards transparency.
The coalition's transparency agenda has seen it publish all spending of more than £25,000, details of who does what in Whitehall, and all current and upcoming contracts.
"The move signifies a real shift in thinking that the NHS is also set to take on," he said.
Although the Department of Health has yet to respond to the recommendations made in the BCS's NHS Information Consultation submitted in January, Lansley explained that the government's role in health informatics was clear.
It must ensure that coding standards are sound, that there is uniformity across the NHS and that systems are interoperable, he said, but added that it was up to local authorities to ensure that they had adequate IT in place to record and access data.
"To date, poor performance in the NHS has gone hidden as has good performance. And openness and transparency shows up faults and leads to embarrassment. But in the long run it will benefit everyone," he said.
The collection of patient records will be of huge benefit for several reasons, according to Lansley. First, it will help "put the patient in control of their own care", because patients will be able to access their records online and can present these to any GP.
He also said that care records are even more useful when they are anonymous and combined for clinical research. For example, combining data related to cardiac surgery, which was done several years ago, and benchmarking this data against other data from different countries has seen a 50 per cent reduction in death after cardiac surgery across the UK.
Separately, the BMA announced last month that it would begin rolling out electronic Summary Care Records again after a decision was made to put their rollout on hold last summer.
The public declaration outlined in the ‘Liberating the NHS’ white paper and reiterated by Lansley confirms that an ‘information revolution’ is crucial to transforming the NHS and meeting the £20bn savings target that’s required.
The fundamental key to unlocking this information is intelligent informatics that helps assist clinician-led decisions by providing relevant and timely information in a format with which they can relate. It is in this way that insight into the collective inefficiencies in practice can be realised and savings made, whilst ensuring that high-quality care continues to be delivered.
There is no doubt that the NHS is awash with data. The problem is that, to date, few organisations have used this data to achieve anything more than basic target measurement. If the vision of joined up cooperation with PCTs, local authorities and, especially, the transition to GP consortia, is to be successful, this data glut must be transformed into valuable insight and information.
It is therefore crucial to ensure that the right data is in place to deliver insight into the quality of care and financial impact of decision making. Access to this information will support the NHS in time of reform and greatly assist in tackling the Health Minister’s aims..
Yours Faithfully,
Paul Fitzsimmons
Managing Director
MedeAnalytics
www.medeanalytics.co.uk
Posted by: Paul Fitzsimmons 14 Apr 2011
The big outsourcing firms and consultancies rub their hands with glee every time a new government comes in. They send in their proposals showing how they can achieve massive cost savings, and underpin it with 'independent' research which they paid for by contributing to various 'think tanks'. You can imagine the bamboozling at full pace: 'cloud', 'KPI'. 'Step-change', 'CapEx vs OpEx', 'private sector expertise', 'synergistic cost savings', 'consumerisation of IT' etc, while baffled ministers not their heads. The new political rubes will be as easily taken in as the previous lot.
Gullible ministers are bewitched by the 'cost savings' and they duly reappear as speeches and press announcements via spin doctors. Let's not pretend Lansley wrote this speech, nor even understands phrases like 'ensure the systems are interoperable'.
In a year of two's time he'll realise that the firm he's tied up with has stitched him with the small print, the costs have escalated, and further more he doesn't really have any choice but to pay because if he doesn't the system will go down with the provider he's working with, who conveniently, will have set up a new 'company' to serve his contract, which will be bankrupted by its cancellation. And they will do everything they can to bury the bad news.
From one google search 'UK government IT failures' I found reference to a DfT IT project that was supposed to save money were costs over-run by £24m, a DVLA system that worked, but in German, an IT scheme designed to help farmers with EU subsidies which left then £1bn out of pocket which the Public Accounts Committee said was 'in danger of becoming obselete' shortly after it was introduced, and the National Offender Management Information System the costs of which doubled to £600m - the project was abandoned and £155m of expense was written off. After that I got bored of the huge number of clear, publicly available information on government's serial IT failure.
Yet your headline simply repeats the government claim without even the slightest note of skepticism. WHY?
Posted by: comments2 08 Apr 2011
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