Select a region
Data can be more dangerous than a scalpel in the world of health – and Jersey needs to ride the digital curve to help make patients safer, an NHS tech pioneer has said.
NHS Digital Transformation Director Andy Kinnear told an audience of Jersey politicians, tech entrepreneurs and health professionals at the island’s first ever Future Health Technology Summit yesterday that it was “vital” that Jersey embraced digital transformation within its health sector to help avoid tragedies.
He said that different health organisations and surgeries being unable to seamlessly share patient data and poorly kept patient appointment and prescription records could be putting both adults and children at risk, and that there was a “frightening number” of cases involving neglect or even death that had arisen as a result.
Such was the case in 2000 for eight-year-old Victoria Climbié, who was tortured, starved and later murdered by her guardians, leading to calls to modernise UK care services that had sometimes relied on “random passing of slips of paper”, Mr Kinnear explained.
Pictured: Mr Kinnear explained that children suffering neglect or abuse might fall through the cracks in the system if information is not properly shared between government departments about their welfare.
“There was a whole history of abuse, but nobody capable of putting the whole story together… Until we can do this, we can’t provide the safest care,” he said.
Modernising data sharing across departments is one of the goals of Jersey’s ‘Digital Health Strategy’, which was launched in January and detailed the island’s ambitions to modernise the health care system by 2025. Part of that will involve the creation of a ‘Jersey Care Record’ - a secure universal online health database, which will allow GPs and government care officials to have access to the same data.
While simple in principle, different health departments and surgeries tend to have different cataloguing practices, which makes the creation of a shared system both difficult and costly. The aims mirror the government’s wider eGov ambitions to allow all government departments - whether tax, education or planning - to seamlessly share information.
"But there is ONLY One #Patient"
— Dr Amir Mehrkar (@DrAmirMehrkar) September 28, 2017
Who needs one joined up care record and a world of personalised health records too! #JerseyFutureHealth pic.twitter.com/EabcEkRRul
Mr Kinnear, who has been described as a “rockstar CIO (Chief Information Officer)”, has achieved just that in the South West of England in recent years. Alongside an NHS digital health team, he successfully ‘joined up’ 17 health organisations across Bristol, which are together responsible for the city’s population of one million.
Better safeguarding was one of the key benefits to ‘joining up’ patient records across departments, but he also explained that the NHS had enjoyed unforeseen efficiency and economic savings too. One council ended up saving £30,000 on toilet installation fees for elderly patients, as the digital health records helped them to better predict and work around their needs.
Another benefit was creating a better experience for the patient as a ‘customer’. “Of course, there’s still that patient that sees the NHS logo everywhere and thinks they’re dealing with one organisation,” he explained - and those patients expect every department to know the same things about their health.
Pictured: The "rockstar CIO" praised the island for its attempts to modernise its healthcare system and create a single digital health record for all islanders.
He congratulated the island’s efforts to embrace the benefits of technology within the sectors of medicine and wellbeing, and suggested that the island might even “run ahead of lots of us in the UK” if it continues on this trend and takes advantage of sharing knowledge with the international community.
“In Jersey you’ve got every single opportunity to be hugely successful and you’ve also got an opportunity to be part of this family - this global thing that’s going on… To work in Digital Health is to do something good for the community, good for your fellow man, so go out and do something good for the people of Jersey.”
You can view Mr Kinnear's full presentation below.
Comments
Comments on this story express the views of the commentator only, not Bailiwick Publishing. We are unable to guarantee the accuracy of any of those comments.