Quarter of NHS data collection to go in red-tape slash plan

A unified solution would help...

..Oh wait!!

Seriously though, there are alternatives to the NPfIT that already are more efficient with data handling!

Automate It While you are at it!

This might be a good time not only to check what information should be collected and processed but how it is collected, processed and held.

Armies of clerks might have been the norm in the 1950s but paying highly qualified graduates to tick boxes is not a good use of ward resources. Every delivery service and its dog now automates things, why not the heath delivery 'service'?

The last time I visited as an outpatient the clerk told me she had spent the morning photocopying some table on the back of the paper I was carrying about the place, snag - the table was never used and was thus useless. The doctor filled my details on his computer, what use was, or should have been the paper anyway? The appointments desk should have access to the data subset they needed for any further outpatient activity driven directly from the doctor's input.

Like most Government ideas, they are 'great on grand' but useless on results where they matter, e,g why, (how come?) book an 'urgent' outpatient in on a Bank Holiday Monday only to cancel it five days because of the holiday and delay for another five weeks. Or is that way they keep the (useless) statistics clean?

The reason why

A former NHS IT manager says

"It seems to me that in the long term more aggregation of data rather than less would make the NHS more efficient"

This is why NHS IT is so terminally ill - because it keeps employing people like David Harley with no imagination and an attachment to dogma that would make a jesuit wince.

Collecting and analysing the right data is important.

Collecting and analysing more data as a blanket policy is not just expensive it is positively dangerous because

a) it tends to make people think they know something that they don't

b) useful knowledge tends to get lost and distorted in a mass of meaningless stats

c) it undermines the confidence of people who are actually qualified to make decisions by second guessing them with ill-informed speculation

And bear in mind that anecdotal information from the right people is of more value than these mass collections of data.

Never let anyone with IT in their job title near an information/data policy.

Cover Up?

Stats are the lifeblood of managing anything. They obviously don't tell the whole story but at a time when wholesale reorganisation is going on don't we need to be able to compare before with after otherwise how do you measure progress?