News in brief
‘Paperless NHS’ plan to put patients’ medical details online: Patients will be able to see their medical details online under plans for a “paperless NHS” in which digital records will be shared between all parts of the health and social care services reported The Guardian. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: “More importantly [than money] it can save billions of hours of time so nurses can spend more time with patients if they are not behind the nurses’ station trying to fill out forms, and I think it can save thousands of lives. A lot of the safety problems in the NHS – people being prescribed with the wrong medication, and ‘never events’ where people have the wrong arm amputated – it’s wrong to say technology is the panacea but it can make a big, big difference.”
PwC finds ‘even more’ IT savings: A report from consultants PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has concluded that the NHS could save billions of pounds a year if “ambitious, proactive NHS organisations” improved their use of information technology, reported eHealth Insider. In a report published ahead of a speech by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt this week, which called for a paperless NHS by 2018, PwC says the NHS could save £4 billion more than the government’s estimate in its NHS information strategy. It argues that around half of this – £1.7 billion – could be generated from four actions, including the roll-out of e-prescribing in hospitals and the Electronic Prescription Service in primary care.
IMS MAXIMS launches dementia software: IMS MAXIMS has launched new software to support early diagnosis and care of patients with dementia, reported eHealth Insider. CEO Shane Tickell said the aim was to help trusts with the increasing demands and costs of dementia care and ensure patients received the most appropriate treatment. The dementia system has been developed in line with the Department of Health’s Commissioning for Quality Innovation payment framework, which incentivises the identification of patients with dementia as well as prompting appropriate referral and follows up.
Lorenzo to transform services for hospital patients: Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust has announced its intention to implement CSC’s Lorenzo EPR as part of a new agreement between the company and the Department of Health, reported eHealth News. Lorenzo will help the trust to eliminate paper records, facilitate agile working, support collaborative working and share information more effectively between clinical staff. The trust is confident that patients will be seen more rapidly than ever before with better treatment outcomes as a result of clinical input in the deployment of this software. Martyn Smith, director of IT and innovation confirmed that Lorenzo will be the heart of a transformational IT programme designed to profoundly change the way the trust carries out the business of caring for the people of Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire.
17 hospitals with unsafe staffing, says Care Quality Commission: The Care Quality Commission watchdog has revealed that seventeen NHS hospitals are among twenty-six healthcare providers in England failing to operate with safe staffing levels, reported the BBC. After carrying out inspections in November the health watchdog has issued the hospitals with warnings. Labour said the findings reflected a “toxic” combination of reorganisation and cuts, but ministers said the number of clinical staff had risen since 2010. About 16% of hospitals failed to come up to the necessary level.
Benefits of technology shown in mobile health worker project: The benefits of mobile technology for health staff and patients was revealed this week by the Department of Health, in the final report of the mobile health worker project, a study on introducing mobile devices at 11 NHS pilot sites. The aims of the study was to understand the requirements of mobile working, and to demonstrate whether increased productivity and efficiency can be achieved by making changes to working processes. Among the findings were: significant increases in productivity can be achieved, as demonstrated by large increases in contact activity; time spent travelling can be reduced; data duplication could be reduced significantly, freeing up clinical time; and significant saving in referrals and admissions can be achieved.
NHS Trust loses £90,000 ICO tribunal ruling: Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust has lost an appeal to have a £90,000 fine issued by the Information Commissioner Office (ICO) overturned, reported V3.co.uk. The NHS trust was hit with the fine in May 2012 after its Pembridge Palliative Care Unit faxed data on a number of its patients to the wrong recipient. However, at the time the trust announced it would challenge the penalty, citing numerous concerns, including the fact it self-reported the breach. The tribunal ruling this week upheld the ICO’s initial fine and dismissed the action by the trust, reinstating the £90,000 fine. The ICO welcomed the decision by the tribunal judge John Angel, with deputy commissioner David Smith claiming it was an important reminder of the ICO’s authority.
Government unveils healthcare sector export champion: Healthcare UK, the new organisation set up to promote Britain’s world leading healthcare sector to international customers, will be launched in the Middle East at a major international trade show this month, announced the Department of Health (DH). In a joint initiative between the DH, NHS Commissioning Board and UK Trade & Investment, Health Minister Lord Howe will launch the organisation at the Arab Health Congress in Dubai on 29th January. He will be joined by UK business ambassador Lord Darzi and the newly appointed healthcare UK managing director, Howard Lyons.
Controversy over corporation tax exemption for private NHS providers: Independent providers to the NHS should be exempt from corporation tax, according to representations given to Monitor’s Fair Playing Field consultation, but the regulator denies it has come to a view yet on what its final review will recommend, reported National Health Executive. Public sector hospitals and providers do not have to pay corporation tax and can reclaim VAT on some non-exempt supplies and support services. Jamie Reed, the shadow health minister, urged the Government not to let “tax avoiders into the NHS.”
GPs to be given rationing thresholds for surgery: GPs will be given thresholds to ration 28 common surgical procedures such as hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and bariatric surgery under new guidance currently being developed by the Department of Health (DH). DH officials revealed that the guidance is currently being developed with the Royal College of Surgeons and NICE, with 28 bits of guidance set to be unveiled in June this year. The guidance will outline when to offer the procedures on the NHS and when to refuse patients the treatment. NHS medical director Sir Bruce Keogh told MPs on the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee that the guidelines would help achieve the so-called ‘Nicholson challenge’ to save the NHS £18.9bn by 2015.
Hospital chief executive role for Matthew Kershaw: Matthew Kershaw, who has lead the failure regime process at South London Healthcare Trust, is to take up a chief executive post at a large teaching hospital in the spring, revealed HSJ (subscription required). Mr Kershaw has been appointed by Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, where he will succeed Duncan Selbie who was announced as chief executive of Public Health England last year. HSJ understands Mr Kershaw was appointed after Brighton and Sussex failed to select a candidate from its first round of interviewees.
Joyce Redfearn confirmed as national director for Health and Wellbeing Board implementation: The Department of Health (DH) has announced that Joyce Redfearn has been appointed national director for the health and wellbeing board implementation at the DH, her primary task will be to ensure that the right support arrangements for 2013/14 are in place when health and wellbeing boards go live in April 2013. In another announcement from the DH this week Jon Rouse has been confirmed as director general for social care, local government and care partnerships at the DH; his responsibilities in his new post will include policies on care and support for adults, the department’s relationship with local government across all of health and care, mental health, disability, health equalities, and health services for children.
Opinion
‘NHS IT should be run like Apple’ – health service director responds to Hunt
This week health secretary Jeremy Hunt declared that “the NHS cannot be the last man standing as the rest of the economy embraces the technology revolution”. His ambitions include making information digitally and securely available for all UK patients by 2015, as well as making the NHS entirely paperless by 2018. As a result of this announcement Peter Gothard at Computing magazine spoke to various experts in the field of medical technology solutions to find out what health authorities will realistically need to do in order to stand any hope of achieving these goals. Here’s a taste of what was said:
Mikko Soirola, vice president of Liaison Technologies said: “The savings potential of going digital is undeniable, but let’s consider the preparation process. To go digital and gain maximum benefit, the data quality has to be of the highest order and data integration across the entire supply chain has to be sorted. To be in a position to digitise those records in the first place, this issue has to be resolved.”
David Bolton, director of public sector QlikTech, agreed that quantity and quality of data are of paramount importance and that “to make the best decisions for patients, the NHS needs to be able to harness vast quantities of data to provide information and insight through appropriate analysis, learn from trends and patterns in order to provide the most effective care, while ensuring privacy controls are in place to protect the patient.”
Director of business informatics at Colchester NHS Trust, Orlando Agrippa, believes that Hunt’s guidelines may have hit the nail on the head. He said: “Following a programme of data sharing between GPs and hospitals over the past 18 months, the trust has changed dramatically [and] we’ve advanced from an organisation where people didn’t understand or interact with numbers from their own data to an organisation where they’re immersed in every single outcome-based discussion, and surrounded by numbers and technology. I believe Jeremy’s ambition is more than achievable before 2018.”
Why NHS funding needs a total rethink
Eddie Chaloner, consultant vascular surgeon at Lewisham hospital, tells the Guardian how the NHS needs a new financial framework as it fails to deliver the free ‘cradle to grave’ service it was set-up to.
Chaloner says the drive to save £20bn from the NHS budget by 2015 is reducing the number of medical services available: “Despite the repeated references to financial savings in most of the official documents on this subject, the Department of Health and politicians repeatedly deny that treatment is being restricted on grounds of cost.
Chaloner continues by stating those who are denied treatment will be forced to use private medical services, with long term detrimental effects to the NHS: “This situation also creates a potential conflict of interest for the professionals who act as both gatekeepers for access to care and as providers. In the long run, this conflict may cause lasting reputational damage in the eyes of the public.”
Looking to the future, Chaloner suggests the country cannot afford to continue to run the NHS anymore: “We require a new model that incorporates a low-cost option for patients unable to afford the high cost of purely private healthcare to be able to obtain treatments no longer funded by the NHS.”
From the frontline
In this week’s opinion on EHI, Andy Carr, clinical lead for IT in ED at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust asks why so few of his fellow nurses are involved in something as critical as healthcare IT.
In his piece Carr recognises the stark contrast to the attitudes of his medical colleagues to IT. He says that nurses often fail to put themselves in a position of influencing the decision making process and that in purely numeric terms, nursing representation in NHS healthcare IT generally should be much higher than it is.
He writes: “Census information for 2011, released by the NHS Information Centre, shows that nurses make up 47% of the NHS workforce as a whole; so why are they not better represented, more involved and more interested in the procurement of vital information systems, which they may find themselves using every day?
“One [reason] is that nurses see health IT as a low priority; they see little value in it and believe that it has very little impact on how they nurse individual patients or clients.
“As a professional group, nurses are very focused on providing hands-on care. The nurses I have spoken to say: “A PC won’t change a wet bed or offer reassuring words to a confused person”.
“Poorly designed and implemented systems have disengaged them, and they now accept whatever is handed down to them.”
He adds that nurses are now facing a tsunami of IT and that if nurses don’t involve themselves in healthcare IT, they will have no part in shaping the way it is used to deliver the information that is needed to enhance nursing care in the future.
Another government, another NHS IT programme?
This week Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced he wants the NHS to be “paperless by 2018”, Mike Simons, Editor of ComputerWorld UK and Techworld agrees that the general population, should have access to electronic medical records and we should be able to determine how widely we share the information our records contain, however he says ministers must realise that no investment equals no savings.
“The thinking behind the statement is laudable. Information technology can significantly enhance patient care and at the same time deliver enormous efficiency savings to the NHS. It can make health care more transparent to patients, medical staff and regulators.
“The present government has some advantages. It put the NPfIT out of its misery and it has negotiated its way out of some terrible contracts. There will be no national programme or central database. Instead there will be targets, roadmaps and technology standards, but where Labour spent £12 billion, the Coalition will provide no new money.
“There is fantastic innovation going on in healthcare IT once again. Some trusts are investing heavily and are reaping the benefits. Some of those who bore the brunt of the pain with introducing pioneering systems under the NPfIT regime are showcasing the true benefits of digital healthcare. While some of the prime contractors under the NPfIT have suffered, a range of other, strong, high quality IT service providers are stepping into the market.
“Hunt is highlighting the prospect of £4.4 billion efficiency savings through the proper use of IT in the NHS. However, unless he accepts that the government has to ‘Invest to Save’ in NHS IT rather than ‘Save to Invest’, we risk squandering another chance to give our health services the IT infrastructure that could make a difference.”
Highland Marketing News
Highland Marketing welcomes another industry advisor: Highland Marketing has appointed Dr Kerry Mathewson to their growing panel of industry advisors, now boasting considerable healthcare experience. Dr Mathewson joins Jeremy Nettle, chairman of Intellect Healthcare Group and Ravi Kumar, chairman of Zanec Software Technologies in an advisory team which supports specialist marketing and PR activities for healthcare organisations around the world.
Highland Marketing appoint Alex Leyton as design lead: Highland Marketing has extended its design and creative capabilities with the appointment of Alex Leyton as design lead. Highland Marketing adds Alex’s experience in visual communications to our increasing pool of talent and skills. This furthers Highland Marketing’s ability to deliver high quality marketing projects which include a major element of graphic design, in addition to other services including PR, social media and business development.
