Easier

I don’t know why they do it.

It’s not like they aren’t clever. I guess it’s the difference between being clever and smart, or educated and savvy.

Last Friday the £walled Times ran a splash about the NHS and the £3.4bn ring-fenced cash to ‘do something’ about NHS IT.

Of all the boneheaded ideas the DH+ strategy and comms people could have come up with, number one on the list, announced, in the Times by the Sugar Plum Fairy;

‘doctors will use the NHS App to monitor your step-counts, to get you back to work’.

Unfortunately, I’m cursed with a long memory. I have seen billions wasted on IT initiatives, fundamentally holed below the water-line, most often by the threat of the intrusive use of our health data.

Connecting-For-Health drowned in large part, because no one could develop a narrative about the use of patient data.

Care.data, similarly sunk by fears about the use of patient data.

There’s a bow-wave of mistrust heading in our direction over the Palantir contract to provide software to manipulate patient data.

Any thought that the use of the NHS App, will be used as a lever to crowbar people back into work is beyond crass. Asinine doesn’t get near it.

Already the tabloids have picked it up and on-line. This is set to cause huge problems. The narrative will switch from the benefits of the app, to the privacy of data.

This was unnecessary, mutton-headed, brainless, ignorant and, well, just plain %^&@! stupid…

… and, it is not true! For whoever made this up, shooting or flogging is too good for them. They deserves three rounds with Mike Tyson and their P45. It is sooooooo damaging.

For over five years the NHS App is the one piece of recently develop NHS technology that the public trust and use… in their millions.

They use it because after a lot of invisible grunt-work, laying the foundations, it’s reliable, simple and private.

It’s relevant to people and their lives. Any suggestion that it will be the work-n-pensions, spy-in-yer pocket will kill it stone-dead.

Any whiff of a thought that personal data will be used across government departments will finish it off in a week.

Relax… this type of functionality does not exist. Indeed, the App developers are having enough trouble connecting it to Trusts, so that patients can choose-n-book secondary-care appointments.

The Wayfinder software to enable it, only exists in a quarter of hospitals and half of them haven’t got it turned on.

That still leaves us with a £3.4bn problem. Just what are they going to do with NHS IT?

I can’t imagine NHSE could winkle that kind of cash out of the Treasury without some sort of a plan and the sooner we know what it is, the better…

… it’ll stop election apparatchiks creating more bonkers-ness… ‘connecting your credit card to the NHS App, to see how many times a week you go to the chip-shop, so we can offer diet advice’. Noooooo!

What will the £3.4bn do? My hope… it will be nothing we can see.

In the same way my relationship with the banks changed forever when I found I could sit on the sofa, pay my bills, set-up standing-orders, send money to a friend in New Zealand, buy an ISA… at three in the morning, in Honolulu.

I want the NHS to invest in the invisible grunt-work of making hospital log-in by face recognition, for front-line staff, standard.

The grunt-work to create proper interoperability, for the right people to see what they need to see, like a Martini, any time any place, anywhere…

… in the hospital for the surgeon,

on Mrs William’s sofa for the community nurse,

at the play-school for the health visitor,

in the middle of the night for the midwife

on the 18th floor of a tenement in Brum

and at 50 miles an hour in an ambulance on the M25.

I don’t want to spend a penny on anything called artificial-intelligence.

I want real brains grunt-working on using machine learning and image recognition for diagnostics and decision support when and where it’s needed.

Grunt-work to create bomb-proof voice recognition for doctor’s notes and bluetooth bedside-observations dropped straight into patient records.

I do not want the kind of stinkin-thinkin that ended up in the Times. I quote;

‘… £430m for the app… by the summer… [to make the nation]… feel healthier…’

What are they going to do by June to make me ‘feel’ anything apart for homicidal?

Or, developments portrayed as ‘AI technology ‘listening in to consultations’… gimmestrength.

There’s an election coming. Beware, the NHS will be the battleground and IT will be weaponised.

We should use the £3.4bn to do the heavy lifting, behind the scenes.

No bells and whistles, just a solid railroad track, to take us to a new destination for the NHS… Easy Town.

The message for the public is; you may not notice at first but the NHS will be a better, safer place and easier to use.

Yup, easier. The six ‘ easy-gets’.

Easy to…

• get in
• get diagnosed
• get fixed up
• get out,
• get on with life and …

… getting a smile from people whose work has been made, easier.

News and Comment from Roy Lilley
Contact Roy – please use this e-address roy.lilley@nhsmanagers.net
Reproduced at thetrainingnet.com by kind permission of Roy Lilley.