England’s National Health Service will invest £4.2 billion ($6.1 billion) on an effort to go paperless and shift chronically ill people to remote patient monitoring, multiple British news sources reported Monday. The spending includes hiring patient safety guru Dr. Robert Wachter of the University of California, San Francisco, to review IT infrastructure across the NHS.
In addition to Wachter, former national health IT coordinator Dr. David Brailer, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO Dr. John Halamka and patient advocate “E-Patient” Dave DeBronkart are among the heavy U.S. representation on the review committee.
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“Improving the standard of care patients receive even further means embracing technology and moving towards a fully digital and paperless NHS,” UK Health Minister Jeremy Hunt said in a statement. “NHS staff do incredible work every day and we must give them and patients the most up-to-date technology – this review will tell us where we need to go further.”
About £1.8 billion, or 43 percent of the total allocation, will go to taking paper out of the system and pushing for interoperability, according to the Daily Mail. The NHS, like so many U.S. healthcare providers, still relies heavily on fax machines to share patient records.
Another £1 billion is earmarked for cybersecurity. while Hunt wants to put £750 million into shifting care away from hospitals. By 2020, the NHS hopes to be able to offer remote patient monitoring services to 25 percent of people with long-term chronic conditions.
Also among the goals is to have 10 percent of patients using apps and online services for routine care, the Daily Mail reported.
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Skeptics — or “sceptics,” as they spell it on the other side of the Atlantic — will point out that this is the sixth time since 1992 that a British health minister has promised a paperless NHS.
Of particular note, the NHS last decade spent at least £9.8 billion ($14.1 billion) on the National Programme for IT, a failed attempt to digitize medical records for all 53.8 million people in England; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had their own, smaller programs. It was touted as the world’s largest IT project, and now stands as a colossal waste of taxpayer money.
Per capita, the NHS put about $263 into the National Programme for IT. The Meaningful Use electronic health records program in the U.S. had doled out $31.9 billion through the end of 2015. With the U.S. population at about 319 million, that works out to just shy of $100 per person.
