Paperless NHS in 5 years - good luck with that !

Posted By Grant Forrest |  last update 24-Jan 2013

http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/ehi/8315/hunt-wants-paperless-nhs-in-five-years

So the former culture secretary Jeremy Hunt reckons that the NHS will be paperless by 2018. I especially liked the comments :

“by April 2018 digital information will be fully available across NHS and social care services, barring individual opt-outs.”

and :

“If banks can develop systems where people are confident about their money, it must be possible for the NHS to develop systems where people are confident about their privacy”

“Barring individual opt-outs”. Wow, that is one hell of a get-out clause.

As for banks, they're multi-billion pound international companies focussed on making money. If keeping a client's data electronically improves their efficiency and increases profit then what's-not-to-like for them ?

I don't know about you, but I doubt the NHS can maintain quite the same focus as banks. Banks don't have to deal with long queues of patients on trolleys in A&E, waiting up to 8 hours to get a hospital bed. That can be distracting for an NHS organisation, to say the least.