Health secretary Jeremy Hunt commits £4bn to NHS tech investment
Hunt to spend £4bn in NPfIT-like project to create a paperless NHS
Health secretary Jeremy Hunt plans to spend £4bn over the next five years on new technology in the healthcare service. Hunt told the BBC that the hefty investment is intended to move the NHS away from paper-based records to more electronic systems. These will, he said, help doctors make faster diagnoses and make life easier for patients.
The latest plans are reminiscent of promises made back in 2002 when Alan Milburn was Secretary of State for Health and announced plans for the IT systems that became known as the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the NHS. It is widely regarded as one of the worst-ever government IT projects.
Hunt told the BBC that he wants to rid the NHS of the bureaucracy derived from filling out paperwork. "We know that proper investment in IT - it's not without its pitfalls - can save time for doctors and nurses and means they can spend more time with patients," he said.
He added that he wants the investment to "ease pressure on the frontline and create stronger relationships between doctor and patient". This builds upon the £1bn investment that the government earmarked in the Autumn Statement for driving new technology adoption in the NHS.
While the full details of how the £4bn of investment will be broken down are yet to emerge, it is expected to include £1.8bn to remove out-dated paper-based systems, such as fax machines; £1bn to bolster cyber security and data access; £750m to improve out-of-hospital care with more digital systems; and around £400m to create an nhs.uk website, healthcare apps and to provide free Wi-Fi across the service.
A significant part of the paperless NHS plans will involve enabling patients to book services and order prescriptions online, as well as giving them the choice of speaking to their doctor online or via a video link.
The funding is also intended to provide NHS patients with access to their own electronic health records, as well allowing that data to be shared between clinicians and other healthcare professionals to reduce the need for duplicating the same information across different health service boundaries.
Creating a paperless NHS with interoperable digital health records is nothing new for the service, which will supposedly achieve that goal, in part, in 2018 and in full by 2020.
However, the Care.data initiative, designed to provide a massive database of anonymous patient information, has already hit delays after it was re-launched following controversy over the use of big data in healthcare.