While the NHS has rightly been lauded as one of the best national health systems in the world, with font line healthcare workers who have shown extraordinary courage and resilience through the COVID-19 pandemic, the accelerating pace of technology and innovation in healthcare dictates that we must not rest on our laurels.
I recommend a new turbocharged digital health strategy for the UK with a vision to provide high-quality, accessible and sustainable care for all by establishing a new digital health ecosystem. Digital healthcare has many advantages in terms of accessibility, quality and affordability but to realise its full potential will require a carefully planned approach. This should encompass a vision, strategic objectives, priority focus areas and implementation principles. Moving ahead quickly, and getting it right, will give a real boost to the digital economy and help offset growing healthcare spend in the UK.
For a country with our level of GDP per capita, aspirations of technological leadership in areas such as AI, genomics and life sciences, the UK has an urgent need to increase its implementation of digital health. The Oct 2018 Dept of Health Paper on entitled Future of Healthcare – Our vision for digital, data and technology in Health and care – was a good blueprint for progress in this regard but we can and must go faster.
In my vision, all of the patient data generated by UK’s hospitals and outpatient clinics (public and private) is digitized. Citizens can access their own medical records via a secure online portal and can choose who else can access their records. The system will improve the cost-effectiveness, sustainability and efficiency of the NHS. It will also facilitate the transition to preventive, rather than curative, medicine and is underpinned by blockchain technology, a crucial pillar in ensuring the integrity and security of all patient data.
Many health services will occur online from video consultations to e-prescriptions. We will reach a stage where over 75% of our entire public bureaucracy is digitised. The digital health ecosystem integrates with other government and private sector systems and automates many ordinarily complex operations. An example is registering a death and notifying all the relevant parties: in the future, once a death in the UK is registered online, notifications are automatically sent to that person’s workplace, the tax office and the population registry.
Our new privacy and data security compliant UK healthcare digital platform can be used to exploit cost-effective and high value benefits not previously available without the access to its data. We will become a trailblazer in launching major clinical pilots in personalised medicine. These pilots combine genomic and other health data to better predict and prevent cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. The long-term goal of these pilots is to develop algorithms that can be fed into clinical decision support software, which would in turn be made available to general practitioners. This way doctors can be empowered to use genomic data to provide more targeted prevention and care to patients.
Underpinning all of this is a world class data and analytics capability, which our top UK universities already have. We just need to put it to work in a new public health strategy. The vision statement of this strategy is simply “Better information – better health!”.
My final idea relates to passports. Leaving the EU means we will need a replacement British passport. If we get it right, our new passports could have an electronic ID which allows UK citizens to access thousands of new digital services provided by the UK government (as opposed to just one – immigration). Estonia is a great model for digital government for us to learn from in this regard.
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