The Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has set out plans for a paperless NHS by 2018. In a speech to the Policy Exchange the Health Secretary said that a series of milestones would mark key stages towards the eventual goal. These include hospitals being able to accept electronic records by 2014 with 2015 seeing electronic referrals in place.
In advance of the announcement a report by PwC suggested that over £4 billion could be saved within the NHS by better use of information and technology. This includes automatic referrals, e-prescriptions and the smart use of technology increasing the time clinicians spend with patients thus leading to a reduction in waiting times.
This latest drive towards a paperless NHS has been broadly welcomed with the only scepticism coming from those who suffered from the failure of the previous attempt by Labour to bring in a centralised NHS system. This latest initiative avoids the “monolithic system” pitfalls by enabling health providers such as GP Practices and hospitals to commission their own systems which will merely be required to share records with other systems. This means that health providers can develop, store and manage records in a way which suits them, subject to central sharing protocols.
There is no doubt that digitising records can save time and money. For example, the John Taylor Hospice near Birmingham has more than doubled the time clinicians can spend with patients simply by using laptops. But the drive towards a paperless NHS can also benefit others within the health care sector. Software such as that offered by the Clinic Appointments patient records service is already helping health practitioners to digitise their patient records. This means that records can be accessed 24/7, there is no time wasted in finding or sorting records and with clinical notes, x-rays and invoices all centrally handled the health practitioner can spend more time on treating patients.
Combined with the telephone answering and diary management service this means that while an osteopath or physiotherapist is treating one patient the Clinic Appointments team can take calls, book appointments and the health practitioner can then call up the next patient’s details at a touch of a button. With faster administration time and no more worries about losing patient records in fire or floods clinicians can concentrate on what they do best, treating their patients.