The NHS will struggle to embrace technological advances in areas such as AI because its basic systems are too slow and “devastatingly user-unfriendly”, according to one of the UK’s leading scientists.
Prof Sir Martin Landray, the co-founder of the UK Recovery trial that saved thousands of lives during the Covid pandemic, said it was “deeply frustrating” that the health service was so far behind other industries such as banking and entertainment in its use of data and technology.
The use of technology in the health service was an important part of Ara Darzi’s review of the NHS last week, which will be the foundations of Labour’s 10-year reform plans. Lord Darzi said the NHS was far less productive than it could be, and one part of the solution would be a “tilt towards technology” by investing in IT systems, particularly in community services rather than acute hospitals.
“Lord Darzi quite rightly points to the opportunities for increased productivity and quality of care,” Landray said last week. “But headline-catching technology such as AI, patient portals, and digital support systems need reliable, secure, and well-connected data [and the basic systems to store and manage it].”
He added: “At present, the basics of desktop clinical and office systems are slow, unreliable and devastatingly user-unfriendly, adding cost, time and frustration. Meanwhile data are in silos – hospital by hospital, GP surgery by GP surgery, with little, if any, available centrally on mental health or community care.
“For many years, the opportunities for technology and the richness of the underlying data have been talked up – yet both as a practising NHS clinician and a researcher it is deeply frustrating to see just how far the NHS lags behind areas such as personal banking, commerce, and the entertainment industry.”
In an interview with The Times on Saturday, Darzi pointed out that only 1% of GP appointments are managed through the NHS app, even though 80% of people in England are registered on it.
“If a bank had 80% of its customers on its app, it wouldn’t feel pleased if only 1% of them could access their current account through it,” he said.
The NHS has been trying to find ways to integrate data and is creating a federated data platform, a seven-year £330m project that has faced opposition after the contract was given to Palantir, a US firm co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel which works closely with the CIA.
Darzi said in his report that some parts of the health service do make good use of technology, and 56% of NHS trusts already use AI tools to examine X-rays and other scans.
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“From the discovery of new treatments to novel diagnostics and biomarkers to routine process automation, there are a multitude of ways in which the health service could see extraordinary change,” he wrote.
Layla McCay, director of policy at the NHS Confederation, said some NHS bodies were already providing “cutting-edge treatments” to patients.
“But not all health service organisations are at the same level of digital maturity, with some lagging behind due to an urgent need for investment and support,” she said, adding that a technological revolution would “not be cheap”. “Some of this is replacing outdated equipment, with reports of NHS staffing having to wait too long for computers to boot up or load,” McCay said. “But while digital infrastructure is important there has been a lack of focus on the skills and capacity to using and managing technology. The latest digital and technological innovations will only benefit patients and boost productivity if staff are trained properly and confident using them.”
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