Although it has not yet officially been announced, there have been reports by Government Computing that the NHS Commissioning Board is set to appoint Ming Tang, managing director at NHS South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Commissioning Support Unit, as the new director for data and information management systems. This could be an interesting move and one to help Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, with his digitisation mission.
Mr Hunt has been paying a lot of attention to data management within the NHS in recent weeks and seems to have a clear vision as outlined in his ‘Digitalising the NHS: The New Imperative’ speech at The Policy Exchange.
It’s a bold stance, but one that needed to be taken, in our opinion. If the NHS is to go digital by 2018, then a lot of work needs to be done. As Mr Hunt himself explained: ‘Every NHS organisation, including all 266 NHS trusts, has a major incentive to do this because the savings are so enormous – £4.4 billion annually according to today’s PWC report – that money, released to spend on better care, can go a long way towards helping them deliver health services sustainably in a time of real financial pressure.’
Cost incentives aside, what needs to be remembered, and what is of utmost importance, is the patient. Therefore ‘going paperless’ will increase efficiencies that will ultimately result in increased and better patient care.
Mr Hunt’s first milestone of giving everyone digital access to their own health records by March 2015 is no mean feat, but a right we should all have. This really links to the openness element of patient data.
His article in The Guardian, entitled ‘Better data means better care in the NHS’, really explains how patient data transparency will equate to an improved healthcare system and trust in the NHS. Although, it’s perhaps a tad unfair, as Mr Hunt states ‘we still have an NHS where clinicians hold information close to their chest’, it should be more of the case, ‘we still have an NHS where clinicians don’t know what to do with the information’.
Fundamental to this vision is the ability to store data efficiently and intelligently, protect sensitive patient data, and share data across individuals, departments and organisations – something that a lot of our customers are doing, making great strides towards this digitisation movement.
We applaud Mr Hunt for taking the bull by the horns and acknowledging that one of the NHS’s most valuable assets is data that, if managed correctly, can provide even better patient care. With his agenda mapped out and with Ms. Tang’s imminent arrival, we’ll be watching closely to see how things progress and are truly excited to see if his plans will come off in the timescales predicted.
