UK a long long way behind on IT in hospitals
The UK lags a long way behind Germany in the implementation of hospital IT, according to enterprise software vendor SAP. Kevin Lynch, who heads up SAP’s healthcare team in the UK, says that only “a handful” of UK hospital groups have implemented even standard back office enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, which bring together human resources, accounting and logistics, plus procurement. By contrast, he reckons that around 70% of German hospitals (public and private) have not only got back-end ERP, but have linked it to patient record software.
These records are now accessible from mobiles and iPads, allowing doctors and nurses doing their rounds to access up-to-date patient data. A doctor can whip out his mobile and show you your latest CT scan. Here in England, when I broke my femur and spent a week at the NHS Whittington hospital in London, records were still part paper-based.
Such systems allow for the real-time management of hospital departments – you can see how accident and emergency is performing in the present moment against a set of key performance indicators.
He claims SAP dominates in Germany, SAP’s home market, but says it has just two big ERP customers in the UK: hospital group Spire and NHS24, a telephone health advice service in Scotland. He claims to have a dozen hot leads elsewhere.
For years, NHS trusts in the UK held off on buying IT because they were waiting for the government to deliver its £12.7bn National Programme for IT. This was scrapped in 2011.
Lynch says that Foundation Trusts have vast amounts of autonomy, with many starting to spec new systems. Not a moment too soon, as they typically have dozens – if not hundreds – of separate software apps, often knitted together with paper systems. He says: “I talked to the finance director of one trust who said that it took him six months to work out that the trust was losing £1.5m a month.” He reckons that a third of trusts are actively looking for a partner, a third are cautiously in a ‘wait-and-see’ approach and a third of trusts still have their heads in the sand. He adds: “The NHS has the technology in place to transform the way it delivers services. However, there does need to be a change in the mindset and culture of the organisation.”
Elsewhere in Europe, he says that Switzerland has good systems; France and Spain, while more patchy, are a lot more advanced than the UK.
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