Staff at UK's massive health service still have interoperability issues with electronic records

Government plans to boost efficiency with IT need to get people onside

UK health professionals remain "skeptical" about electronic patient records, despite the NHS in England achieving more than 90 percent coverage.

They described struggling to access notes and test results from other providers, leading to time-consuming efforts to track down patient information

In a new report, think tank The Health Foundation points out that while successive government have striven to implement electronic patient records (EPRs) in the NHS to improve productivity in the publicly funded services, concern remain the poor implementations are holding back progress.

One of the world's largest health providers, the NHS in England employes around 1.34 million people and runs an annual budget of £188.5 billion ($241 billion). An early attempt to introduce EPR from central government, which launched around 2003, led to the disastrous National Programme for IT, which spending watchdog the National Audit Office said failed to achieve value for money before it was canned in 2011.

Since then, the successive governments have attempted to end the use of paper records, with 2024 set as a target to achieve a "core level of digitization" in all care providers.

The Health Foundation report said: "While the achievement of 90 percent EPR coverage is substantial, skepticism remains among both industry and health care professionals as to the benefits currently being gained from these systems. Many feel that EPRs have, for the most part, been poorly implemented or are being used only for their most basic functionalities."

Although clinical staff see electronic records as one of the technologies with the greatest potential to save them time in their work within the next five years, interviewees speaking to the Health Foundation said barriers to success included longstanding challenges with interoperability and data sharing. They described struggling to access notes and test results from other providers, leading to time-consuming efforts to track down patient information.

"This kind of qualitative evidence is supported by the results from the first year of the Digital Maturity Assessment (DMA), which revealed that although 90 percent of trusts have an EPR in place, only 10–30 percent of these EPRs are using more advanced functions – such as integrated prescriptions or record sharing with other hospitals," the Foundation said.

Before being dumped by the electorate, the previous Conservative government said it would invest £3.4 billion ($4.36 billion) in modernizing NHS IT systems to produce £35 billion ($44 billion) of savings.

Before he became Prime Minister, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said "moving from an analogue system to a fully digital NHS" could "totally reframe the NHS and how it operates, and save money."

The Labour government, elected in July last year, has announced £2 billion ($2.56 billion) to upgrade NHS technology to produce efficiency savings.

The research can provide an early warning. People, as well as investment, determine the success of technology projects. ®