Paperless health service open to criticism
Today health secretary Jeremy Hunt will call for the NHS to be paperless by 2018.
As well as saving the NHS billions of pounds a year through better use of IT, this is part of a move to give people access
to their health records online.
I think this could be a potentially disastrous step. And it would appear those in charge are also reluctant – since the idea was first announced back in 2010, progress on the transition has been slow.
The NHS already gets plenty of stick – whether over patient waiting times, poor care or lack of staff – and this will be magnified if the public are given, as is proposed, the opportunity to report personal experiences and rate NHS organisations online. A lot of harm can be done if people are given free range to voice their opinions, with Twitter being a prime example.
The move could open up a bedpan of abuse and provoke personal attacks on individual members of staff.
Although some aspects of the initiative would indeed be useful, such as booking GP appointments online, I fear a system with no paper is a system fit for failure.
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It’s good to modernise and have a goal to aim for. Has not electronic e-mail revolutionised communication in the World.
But the Public Sector is littered with grand e-systems and initiatives often costing millions. Even in the private sector there are big operational challenges. How long did it take for one’s account to be migrated when Building Societies and banks merged? Years. Then someone in India pressed the wrong button & people couldn’t get their money out.
NHS systems are complicated and often bespoke. Often there has to be lots of money spent on interfaces, to allow systems to communicate with each other. Then the cost of training. Governence issues.Security. Who can trust the Cloud. Then bespoking the systems as each organisation does things in a different way. And there is little choice of systems in the market with a few big boys (Predominantly American) charging their big prices.
I think most people will welcome change in this sector, but big bang approaches by successive Governments have not got a good track record, and a bit of co-ordinated thought and a realistic timetable is needed, or once again we will waste Tax payers money.