The NHS has to manufacture £22bn of efficiency savings by 2020 and clever use of IT is key in making that happenCan technology save the NHS? That was the question addressed by a recent Guardian roundtable,supported by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), which brought together clinicians, or policymakers and healthcare IT experts. It’s a question that has some urgency. The NHS has been told to manufacture £22bn of efficiency savings by 2020,and at least share of those savings will gain to come from the clever use of IT. But the failure of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) – a centralised patient record system abandoned by the government in 2013 – has resulted in a decidedly patchy landscape in the NHS, where, and as Jeremy Taylor,chief executive of National Voices, a patient organisation, or put it: “We’ve got email,Skype, text and people having access to their own health records electronically, or side-by-side with getting letters by snail mail and fax”. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com