We need IT to stop NHS flushing away cash - ex-Health Sec When the Audit Commission published its review of England's NHS this summer and warned of growing financial pressures, trusts already knew that achieving savings equivalent to about 5 per cent of their budgets each year until 2015 meant doing things differently and more efficiently. Stephen Dorrell, the chair of the health …
...that his local hospital is regularly using taxis to deliver surgery cancellation letters to patients.
One wonders whether there might be some sort of high-tech low-latency alternative involving the transmission of voice data over a distance.
Apparently there is also the practice where both patient and patient record are transmitted from one hospital to the other, at the same time, using two different taxis, because the patient is not allowed to carry their own record.
There are good reasons for this apparent nonsense, right?
'ang on a minute.
Businesses started using computers to control accounts and purchasing and stock level between the 1960s and 1980s. Is Dorrel saying that of all that money spent on NHS IT over decades and decades none of it went to the simplest, longest established, best understood use of computers?
And wasn't he in charge of it?
Frimley Park hospital in surrey does MRI's and x-rays relativeky quickly however other hospitals and even local neurologists request repeats as the quality is so low as to be useless. A friend had to have the MRI redone at charing cross - the results were so different that CC contacted FP to confirm that the results were not for another patient. IT does nothing to stop this sort of gratuitous waste.
Another bis issue is the practise of destroying any documents over five years old. Pauls MRI scans had been destroyed even though they were less than five years old. His Neuro went apeshit... It would make far more sense to *give* the "long term" records to patients such as Paul. Instead FP charges 20UKP for a blurred CD digital image of each MRI or Xray image.
Finally hospitals use very expensive secure disposal services for patient data. SImply giving "expired" notes to patients would eliminate this expense.
Everywhere I look you see these nupties sign big contracts with stupid clauses, instead of first developing a best of the best framework with standards that will support a mixture of vendors. The moment you enable competition instead "gimme everything and I'll bung you a bundle" single vendor contracts, you not only drop your overall costs, but you also open the market for new providers that could take fresh ideas and technology where it can do the most good.
But hey, for some people that would mean less budget to manage, and maybe fewer holidays. Can't have that now, can we?
I've seen the waste first hand from the back of an NHS project. I was tasked with rolling out and installing quite a large number of IBM racks (which was always delivered on time by IBM).
I met my deadlines and racked the systems then placed them in the correct locations within each DC (all the DC's are in London I might add).
I also installed all the OS's on each of the systems.
I then found out that some of the racked systems where being removed and shipped to Scotland (yes that's correct, Scotland!) just to have Linux and Sendmail installed onto them.
It could have all been completed remotely........or better yet, I could have performed the installs.
Such a waste of time :/
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