News in brief
Financial problems ‘endemic’ in NHS: Money problems in the NHS in England are becoming “endemic” – and despite the extra money promised by government, there is no guarantee the service will get back on track, auditors say. The National Audit Office (NAO) said levels of deficits were “becoming normal practice”. Last month, ministers unveiled plans to increase the NHS budget by £8.4bn above inflation in this Parliament. However, the NAO said it was not clear if that would lead to stability, reported the BBC. It said much would depend on how NHS England’s five-year plan for reforming services panned out. Set out last autumn in a document called the Five-Year Forward View, this involves providing more care out of hospitals in a bid to save £22bn by 2020. But the NAO said it relied on “untested” plans for which there was “limited evidence”. The auditors highlighted the growing levels of deficits in the health service. This year, a deficit of more than £2bn is being forecast by NHS trusts. Overall, three-quarters of the 239 trusts had overspent at the half-year mark, with the most serious problems being seen in hospitals.
NHS England sets aside £1.8bn “sustainability and transformation fund”: NHS England is to put £1.8bn of the additional funding it has received for 2016-17 into a centrally managed “sustainability and transformation fund”, reported Health Service Journal (subscription required). The Department of Health (DH) said that money from the fund would be allocated directly to acute hospitals to help them eliminate deficits next year, but payment would depend on the providers “meeting a number of strict and non-negotiable conditions”. The fund will comprise just under a third of the £5.5bn cash terms increase to NHS England’s budget in 2016-17. In a statement, the DH said the fund would be broken down into two parts. The first would be “distributed to all providers of emergency care” to help them achieve financial balance, provided they have agreed 2016-17 “control total” targets with NHS Improvement and can demonstrate “initial progress” on meeting the other conditions attached to the funding. The second element would be used to “target providers which can deliver additional efficiencies and improvements”. It is not known what the exact split will be, however it is likely that the bulk of the funding will be targeted at reducing provider deficits.
Scottish Budget: Record spending on the NHS comes with a health warning: Spending on health and sport in Scotland is to exceed £13bn for the first time – but the extra money came with a stark warning about the future, reported The Herald. The budget statement for 2016-17 promised NHS boards a 5.5% increase in funding with a clear message from finance secretary, John Swinney that the additional cash must be used to reform the way care is delivered. He said: “The nature and scale of the challenges facing our NHS, in particular the challenge of an ageing population, mean that additional money alone will not equip it properly for the future. It will not cope with the pressure that it faces. To really protect our NHS we need to do more than give it extra money. We need to use that money to deliver fundamental reform and change the way our NHS delivers care.” While some might say the SNP government has stood in the way of some NHS reforms – blocking the centralisation of hospital services – they are taking the big step of combining NHS and social care budgets under new joint boards from next April. The budget statement says £250m is to be directed towards these boards to improve outcomes in social care. There’s also £45m to help reform the way GP surgeries and linked care services work. The spending forecast document reads: “By contrast with the UK Government we see health and social care as parts of the same interdependent system, and so, through this budget, we will protect both NHS and social care spending.”
GPs should urge patients “to go online”: GPs should actively encourage patients to go online for booking appointments and ordering repeat prescriptions, according to a review of digital services in the NHS in England. Baroness Martha Lane Fox, former internet entrepreneur and government adviser, wants the NHS to push forward with an IT revolution, reported the BBC. Her recommendations include ensuring every NHS building provides free Wi-Fi. She says every GP practice should get 10% of patients to go digital by 2017. Currently there is wide variation in online access at different surgeries. Health secretary, Jeremy Hunt asked the baroness to look at how take-up of internet services could be made widely available and include the 10 million people who currently have no online access. Baroness Lane Fox, also says that the NHS should do more to train and support staff and patients in digital skills. She said: “One of the founding principles of the NHS was to ensure that everyone should have equal opportunity to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.” Tim Kelsey, NHS England national director for patients and information, said: “Digital health tools can dramatically improve people’s lives and well-being. These bold challenges to the system to ensure that every person in the UK benefits are very welcome.”
Revised vanguard support package published: The NHS Five Year Forward View partners have published an updated national support package for all 50 vanguards. This follows an initial programme of support published in July 2015 for the first 29. Since then, a further 21 have been selected, eight urgent and emergency care (UEC) and thirteen acute care collaboration (ACC) vanguards, reported NHS England. “New operating models” have been added to support the ACC vanguards, who are linking hospitals together to improve their clinical and financial viability. It will also support the UEC vanguards to explore models to ensure they are working effectively as integrated communities. “Governance, accountability and provider regulation” is designed to help the vanguards develop the right organisational form and governance model, as well as understand the impact on how they are regulated. The national package has been developed to enable the vanguards to make the changes they want effectively and at pace. Samantha Jones, director of the New Care Models Programme, said: “I have been impressed by the consistent appetite for change across the vanguards. Andrew Bennett, senior responsible officer for Better Care Together (Morecambe Bay Health Community) said: “To have all these resources available in one place will be of enormous benefit to all vanguards across the country.”
89 footprints on NHS digital plan: NHS England has received 89 “footprints” from local healthcare economies working to develop roadmaps for the future of their digital health services, reported DigitalHealth.net. The footprints list the health and social care organisations involved in creating and implementing local digital roadmaps, which provide a framework for how different areas intend to create a joined-up, paperless health and care service by 2020. NHS England’s director of digital technology, Beverley Bryant said that NHS England had received a total of 89 footprints, of which 42 are from individual clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) and 47 are from groups of multiple CCGs. The roadmaps are part of a wider focus on joining up health and social care, which Bryant said was one of two main jobs, alongside greater patient empowerment, for NHS England to drive the adoption of technology for a sustainable healthcare system. Another goal for NHS England is to “open up the market” in primary care, where there are just four main suppliers. Bryant said that there are around 50 suppliers “in the pipeline” but this will be reduced to around 20 by March once the programme goes ahead.
Stevens casts doubt over NHS devolution outside Manchester: Simon Stevens has said he expects “not many” areas will be given control of devolved NHS budgets outside of Greater Manchester in the next few years, in his first major interview since last month’s spending review, reports Health Service Journal (subscription required). The NHS England chief executive also said NHS and social care commissioning budgets could not be joined until there was a “viable” funding proposition for social care. Asked how many areas would take on devolved health budgets in the next few years, Stevens said: “Probably not many.” He added that apart from Greater Manchester, the few devolution deals that did include health would not quickly bring about the full integration of health and social care. “I’m not sure I would bracket Cornwall with Greater Manchester, to tell the truth,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s not going to happen but a lot of work has got to take place in Cornwall before it would be in a position to assume more responsibilities over and above those which they are grappling with.” Some London boroughs would “make serious steps towards integration”, while the West Midlands may invest in mental health services to reduce the benefits bill, Stevens said these examples “were short of the full joint health and social care commissioning being set up in Greater Manchester”.
Ireland races to implement health IT: Ireland has created an Individual Health Identifier for all patients, and implemented an e-referral system in half of all its hospitals, over the past six months, reported DigitalHealth.net. In June this year DigitalHealth.net reported that Ireland had launched a “Knowledge and Information Strategy”, which focused on getting a new IT infrastructure, interoperable systems, data use, and patient services in place for its health services. Ireland’s chief information officer for health, Richard Corbridge said getting that plan approved and published gave the go-ahead to create eHealth Ireland, taking different IT functions from across the country and moving them into one national function for delivery of healthcare IT. This means there is a single design authority and technology office and project management office, so “you are getting the best economies of scale”, he explained. The top priority for the new organisation was the creation of the Individual Health Identifier, which acts like the NHS Number in the UK. This will be used to identify patients throughout the Irish healthcare system and went live in the first week of September. Corbridge said the team went from almost a standing start to a functioning IHI within about six months. “We have a series of GP system suppliers, who aren’t the same as the UK, and all have said they will implement the IHI in 2016.” It will also be added to all referral letters from January next year so it will appear in hospital patient administration systems and discharge letters to GPs.
24-hour automated appointment booking system “saving GP time”: A 24-hour, automated telephone appointment-booking system is “saving time” for practices in south-west England, reported Pulse. The “Patient Partner” system, funded by NHS England and NHS Bath and North East Somerset Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) for a two-year trial, has been installed in 25 out of 27 GP practices in the region, and is intended to save time for practices as well as improving patient access. A CCG spokesperson told Pulse that it has “already seen hours of practice time saved including from people using the system to cancel appointments and therefore avoiding no-shows”. Project director Amanda Simpson said: “We hope that by making it easier for patients to make an appointment with their practice, it will also be easier for them to access services.” Oliver Walton, practice manager at Batheaston Medical Centre in Bath said: “The telephone system gives all our patients the option of managing their appointments when they want or need to. For us, it helps to reduce the numbers of calls coming through and releases our time to spend with patients – we’ve already had a great response to the new system.”
Cost-saving facilities management framework launched: NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) has launched a facilities management framework which aims to save the NHS millions of pounds in efficiency savings, reported The Commissioning Review. The framework is designed to offer services that range from asbestos removal to PAT testing, laundry, and the management of grounds and gardens. NHS SBS is a part Department of Health owned joint organisation, which aims to save the NHS £1bn in efficiencies by 2020. NHS SBS has estimated that efficiencies in security services alone could conservatively save both the NHS and local government £6m every year. Given the breadth of services on offer and the volume of NHS and public sector buyers that are being given access to the framework, total savings for the taxpayer could be much higher. The framework is Official Journal of the European Community (OJEU) compliant, and offers protection to buyers with robust terms and conditions, along with fixed prices for a minimum of two years. Peter Akid, director of procurement at NHS Shared Business Services said: “Fully compliant with European procurement laws and offering virtually every service required in NHS and public sector estates, the facilities management framework really is a one stop shop for the public sector. It means procurement teams will no longer need to manage multiple frameworks or embark on costly and time-consuming local tendering.”
London NHS devolution deal signed: Chancellor George Osborne and health secretary Jeremy Hunt have signed a health devolution deal for the NHS in London that follows a similar agreement for Manchester, reported DigitalHealth.net. The agreement, which was signed at Great Ormond Street Hospital, will begin with five integration pilots across the capital, including the creation of an accountable care organisation in Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge. Accountable care organisations are a US innovation in which a group of providers take responsibility for all the care for a given population, often in return for a capitation payment. They are a relatively new innovation in the UK, but since NHS England’s chief executive, Simon Stevens, spent a period of his career in the US, they are often seen as a possible direction of travel for NHS integration initiatives. In north east London, the development will see a large part of the budget controlled by NHS England handed over to an integrated organisation being developed by the three borough councils, two clinical commissioning groups (CCG’s) and two NHS trusts. They argue this will help the local health economy to address an annual deficit that is projected to reach £440m, by enabling more money to be directed to prevention and primary care. The parties to the bigger agreement are London Partners, which comprises all of London’s CCGs, local authorities, and the Greater London Authority, and relevant national bodies, including the Treasury, the Department of Health, and its arm’s length agencies.
GP patients in Wales will get access to medical records by 2017: By 2017, GP patients in Wales will be able to view their medical records, letters and update their information online through a citizens’ portal, reported ComputerWeekly. Patients can already book GP appointments online and order repeat prescriptions through the My health Online system. Further down the line, patients will also be able to view medication information, view any information held by hospitals, community and social care and see which health and care professionals have accessed their records. Launching the strategy, health and social services minister Mark Drakeford said it sets out the Welsh government’s ambition for digitally enabled health and social care. “Digital technology is now an important part of our everyday lives. We use it at work, to shop, to bank and to keep in touch with family and friends. Our vision is for more interactive, personalised health and social services, allowing people to access services from wherever and whenever it’s convenient to them,” he said. “Giving people more control over their care and access to their records is an important part of the notion of co-production – the recognition that health outcomes are maximised when the contribution of patients as well as practitioners is captured and put to work.”
MOD extends CGI records contract: The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has extended its contract with CGI to provide an integrated electronic health record service for the UK’s armed forces, reported DigitalHealth.net. The new contract is for three years, with options to extend, and will allow CGI to build on its current work on the Defence Medical Information Capability Programme (DMICP), which serves as a centralised system for the health and dental records of all 300,000 UK military personnel. Logica, which was later acquired by CGI, began work on the DMICP system in 2006 basing it on EMIS PCS, an existing clinical system for primary care. The project managed to replace paper records at around 500 medical and dental facilities across the world and was named overall winner at the EHI Awards in 2012. The new contract sees the introduction of a programme called Intermolar to replace the DMICP. According to CGI, it will allow the MOD to ensure the continued delivery of the integrated record while it works out the long-term strategy for its healthcare IT. Air Marshal Paul Evans, surgeon general, Ministry of Defence, said: “We are delighted to continue our close relationship with CGI to ensure Intermolar delivers the reliable service that we currently receive from DMICP. We are confident Intermolar will play a key part in our continuous drive for efficient and patient-focused processes and services.”
Hospital staffing ‘affects death rates’: Fewer patients die after emergency surgery in hospitals that have more doctors and nurses, a study suggests. The research, published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia, analysed data involving nearly 295,000 patients. The findings stood despite patients at these hospitals being sicker and suffering more complications, reported the BBC. Researchers also found death was more likely following a weekend admission, which they said showed staffing was factored in the so-called weekend effect. Ministers in England are looking to improve staffing levels on the weekend, citing previous research as the basis for their policy. Higher rates of death following weekend admissions and among babies born at weekends have been identified in two papers published by the British Medical Journal since the summer. While this study confirms what would be expected – better resourced hospitals provide better care – it is this link with weekend care that has sparked interest. Lead researcher Dr Peter Holt said it was likely there would be a number of factors behind the higher death rates at weekends, but “clearly” staffing was one. “We need to ensure the whole system is safe seven days a week,” he said.
NHS discharge delays hit record levels: Vulnerable patients are getting stuck in hospital in England as delays discharging people hit record levels, reported the BBC. There were more than 160,000 days lost to delays in October – up a third since 2010 when record-keeping began. Experts said the problems were being caused by a lack of community services into which to release patients. The report said investing in intermediate care beds could provide a solution – allowing hospitals to discharge the frailest patients into a safe environment until they have recovered or until care packages could be arranged in their own homes or permanent places found in care homes. This has been done in Glasgow, where the local council and NHS have worked together over the past year to ensure care home beds have been freed up for hospital patients to move into temporarily. Nuffield Trust chief executive Nigel Edwards predicted that this winter, hospitals were going to find it “even more difficult to cope” unless the health service invested in intermediate care beds to get patients out of hospital. An NHS England spokesman said: “Nobody could argue there isn’t ongoing pressure on the NHS. Despite this our staff continue to provide quality services in the face of increasingly high levels of demand throughout the healthcare system.”
NHS slashes time taken to pay suppliers: The time taken to pay NHS suppliers has been cut by half, reported Building Better Healthcare. NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) announced this week that timescales had been dramatically reduced as a direct result of moving to cloud-based business platform, Tradeshift, just over a year ago. Suppliers who use the platform are now paid in an average of 24 days instead of 42 – a 43% improvement. Late payments continue to put the solvency of businesses at risk across the globe, especially small businesses. According to the Asset Based Finance Association (ABFA), UK SMEs are now waiting on average 72 days to get paid. The NHS has 175,000 suppliers and processes 7.2 million invoices a year, accounting for £170 billion of spend. By slashing payment times, it is leading the way in improving cashflow conditions for thousands of businesses of all sizes within its supply chain. In addition to this, by transitioning from paper to cloud-based electronic invoices, NHS SBS has also become significantly more efficient with less resource required to push an invoice through the payment process, reducing the burden on NHS resources and allowing public money to be redirected to more-valuable services.
Survey questions future of health apps: The use of mobile healthcare apps may be on the decline; before apps have had a real chance to make an impact, according to a new survey, reported DigitalHealth.net. Of around 1,000 healthcare professionals from across the world that took part in the survey by market research firm Cello Health Insight, 55% said that in the past year they had recommended a healthcare app to patients, but only 36% intended to do so in the future. Paul Mannu, director of Cello Health Insight said: “Doctors don’t currently associate healthcare apps and wearables with serious preventative disease management tools. This is because they are evidence-based professionals and expect to be convinced by evidence that the intervention will benefit the patient.” He added that a “game-changer” would be evidence of an app that could reduce disease burden for a patient and management burden for a clinician. For doctors that have recommended healthcare apps, the most common uses are for diet and weight loss, general health and fitness, and smoking cessation, according to the survey. Some doctors are also embracing wearable technology to improve people’s fitness; 33% of doctors surveyed say they would recommend wearable technology to their patients in the future, although just 9% use fitness tracking technology themselves. As for doctor-patient communications, new technologies lag well behind more established media.
Orion Health announces global launch of Amadeus: Orion Health, has announced the launch of Amadeus, a platform that will enable highly personalised healthcare and the implementation of Precision Medicine, reported Hospital Healthcare Europe. CEO, Ian McCrae said: “Amadeus is at the forefront of Precision Medicine – the newest frontier in modern healthcare. Precision Medicine is enabled when all information unique to an individual is combined to identify preventative care and treatments, which will be effective for them based on genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors.” Amadeus is a secure open-data platform that scales to aggregate and manage different types of health-related data. Orion Health has evolved its industry-leading population health management platform to accommodate huge data file sizes, including genomic information. Amadeus combines Orion Health’s extensive data integration experience with the scalability and performance of its modern technologies Cassandra, Spark and ElasticSearch. It has a distributed architecture to handle massive volumes of high velocity data. McCrae says that Amadeus goes beyond delivering the technology for today’s integrated care and population health management needs – it future-proofs organisations for emerging models of care.
HSCIC paper notes NHSmail 2 rollout delay: The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) has pushed back the planned launch of the NHSmail 2 service until July next year, reported Government Computing. A recent HSCIC board paper said that the delivery timeline for the full rollout of the new managed e-mail service has been “extended” to July 31, with planned pilots sent to take place in February and March. The Department of Health formally announced in July that it had awarded Accenture a £60m contract to deliver the new NHSmail service in a move designed to overhaul sharing of sensitive data between healthcare bodies. The NHSmail2 contract has been awarded though the governments managed email framework, which allows public sector bodies to acquire email services through a single agreement. The two-year framework includes Accenture, BT, CSC, Vodafone, and GDIT as its suppliers, and is valued up to £350m. All five suppliers submitted bids for the NHSmail 2 contract.
46% of Scots NHS staff say they are overworked, says survey: Almost half of Scotland’s NHS workforce say they are unable to do their jobs properly because of a growing pressure on their time, an annual survey has found. The survey found that only a third of NHS employees in Scotland feel that staffing is sufficient for them to do their job properly, reported The Scotsman. Scottish Labour public services spokesman Dr Richard Simpson, said the SNP government was presiding over “short term crisis management” in the NHS. Dr Simpson, a former GP, said: “Now more than ever we need a health service free at the point of use based on clinical need, not the ability to pay. Our NHS is our most valued public service and it needs to have the resources to deliver the care Scots need. Health secretary, Shona Robison said NHS staff numbers were at a record high, with increased student nursing and midwifery intakes, and £450,000 to be invested over the next three years in a scheme to encourage former nurses back into the profession. “It is welcome that staff remain committed to their roles, with almost nine out of ten willing to go the ‘extra mile’ at work.” She said.
Health and Social Care Council 2016: After four weeks of voting for candidates, techUK has welcomed four new and three returning members successfully elected to their Health and Social Care Council. techUK had an unprecedented number of candidate entries this year. The Council for 2016 includes: Paul Cooper, research director, IMS MAXIMS, Mark Davies, medical director, MedeAnalytics and Jeremy Nettle, global client director healthcare, Oracle who have all been re-elected. The appointed chair and vice-chairs will be confirmed in the New Year, and new members’ biographies will be made available shortly on the council page.
Newton to take over from Kelsey: Public Health England’s (PHE) John Newton is to replace Tim Kelsey as chair of the National Information Board (NIB) on an interim basis, reported DigitalHealth.net. Newton, who is chief knowledge officer at PHE, will serve in the role until the summer when a more permanent replacement is due to be announced, Kelsey said at yesterday’s NIB leadership summit. Kelsey plans to step down from both this role and his position as national director for patients and information at NHS England this month, in order to take up a new job in Australia. Newton has been with PHE since 2012 and has served on the NIB board since its conception last year. His prior roles include regional director of public health for NHS South Central and director of research and development in two large NHS teaching hospitals. Speaking at the NIB meeting, he said his main task will be to keep up, and possibly increase, the pace of the NIB’s work on delivering “Personalised Health and Care 2020”, the framework that is driving development to a paperless NHS by 2020. “The worst thing that could happen with Tim leaving is a loss of momentum,” he said. He also confirmed that the NIB will support and act on recommendations made by Martha Lane Fox on four key ‘building blocks’ to support uptake of digital services in the NHS.
From the team at Highland Marketing we would like to wish all our Healthcare Roundup readers a very happy Christmas and all good wishes for 2016.
The next issue of the Healthcare Roundup will be published on Friday 8th January 2016
Opinion
Only a Royal Commission will get us talking sensibly about the NHS
A new independent review of NHS finances is needed, writes Margaret Thatcher’s former health and social security secretary Norman Fowler, in The Telegraph this week.
“A Royal Commission would most nearly fit that bill. It would inform the public in a way that no think tank can do and also have the capacity to transform the national conversation about the NHS. The essential task would be to address the financing question and to examine whether there are any new or additional ways in which resources can be gathered.
“No one should be deprived of healthcare because of a lack of resources. That, I believe, is common ground between all the parties – in spite of some of the self-serving rhetoric of Labour politicians. But nowhere is it written that the health service should be isolated from new ideas.
“There are a range of options. A health tax would have the advantage of connecting more closely the public to the service they finance. Charges for missed GP and outpatient appointments should certainly be considered. So too should be the range of prescription charge exemptions – currently 80 per cent of prescription items are dispensed free. Many need the benefit of the exemption but others could afford to pay.
“Most radical of all, a Royal Commission could try to settle the argument once and for all on whether it would be possible to move to an insurance system, with exemption for those unable to pay.
“This would have the huge advantage of taking much of the health bill out of public spending by the taxpayer. Many countries overseas have insurance systems and seem to survive with fewer complaints. A Royal Commission should look carefully at their experience.
“It may seem to the government that the least controversial course is to stay as we are. A NHS more or less ring-fenced from public spending cuts. But the more you ring-fence health, the more you have to find savings in public spending in other areas, particularly when spending on the retired is also ring-fenced.”
Another view: of progress (or otherwise)
Traditionally, Christmas is a time for making merry and laying big plans for the year ahead. GP Neil Paul prefers to look back over the many, irritating IT problems that remain unfixed – and yet should be easy to deal with.
“Browser incompatibility stumps me: I just don’t understand how it is such an issue. At my surgery, we have just been upgraded to Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8. I went on a website the other day for a clinical trial for which I’m principal investigator, and it wanted IE 7 – I had to turn on ‘compatibility mode’ to even see it. Yet today I hear that Microsoft is about to stop security updates for IE 8 and possibly 9 and 10! The new laptops I’ve bought for my kids for Christmas come with Windows 10. So our ‘upgrade’ is multiple versions behind – and yet it’s too ‘modern’ for one of the sites I need to use.
“I still walk into practices with a PowerPoint presentation and find they have too old a version to even read modern files. Why can’t we just all have modern, up-to-date kit on our desktops? Why does the NHS put up with this? I’ve mentioned before that patients of mine who happen to be IT managers just turn over all their company’s equipment every 18 to 36 months. They just replace it with the latest kit because they are convinced it saves them money in security and support in the long term.
“Despite years of people talking about single sign-on, I now have more passwords than ever. In fact, I just can’t keep up and have been forced to give up on everything I was told about security. I’ve started writing them down in a book that I keep in a locked drawer.
“There are so many ways in which little improvements could be made. Maybe 2016 should be ‘make the life of a GP easier year’. It might even save the NHS! But in the meantime, have a good Christmas.”
Top five ways technology can drive effective primary healthcare
Josie Byrne, account director at Black Pepper Software, investigates the top five ways technology will drive the efficiencies of primary care throughout the country. By combining these five key components, the primary health service will have a structured, sophisticated and digitised system which can offer the highest quality care to all patients.
“1. Integrate Systems
The NHS can improve its digitised services by further integrating systems within primary healthcare. Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, recently announced full GP records including blood-test results, appointment records and medical histories will be available next year on smartphones. Using the right software to continue integrating these apps within the main infrastructure already in place will increase efficiency and drive effectiveness within primary healthcare’s digital services.
“2. Empower the patient
Helping patients embrace new technologies and showcasing how beneficial the technology is will empower the patient and increase efficiency within primary healthcare. By empowering the patient and giving them control of their medical records, it is not only cost effective, but it will help improve the lifestyle of patients and increase their knowledge of their own healthcare. To make sure this can be achieved successfully, the NHS must provide simple, reliable and affordable access for patients to use the technology for primary healthcare.
“3. Accessible technology
It’s vital technology is accessible for all patients. This includes ensuring the software is easy to use and understand, as well as being available to all patients regardless of their disabilities.
“4. Increase interaction
The first point of call for patients needs to be efficient and successful at all times. With the increased use of technology, this can be achieved by giving patients the opportunity to choose how to contact their primary healthcare service. This will offer the patient options to contact their GP or dental practise by their personal preference moving from push communication to pull communication.
“5. Embrace emerging technologies
By increasing the amount of technology the primary healthcare uses, its current infrastructure will only get stronger. With the NHS seeing the opportunities technology can bring, successfully implementing new ideas and technology into primary healthcare services will be accepted by patients and medical staff.”
Highland Marketing blog
In this week’s blog Rob Benson looks back on 2015 and what it brought for health technology in the UK.
