The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is no exception, and throughout the pandemic, technology has played a vital role in its coronavirus response. The successes include temporary “Nightingale” hospitals opened in 2020 to deal with the sheer volume of patients, the online infrastructure that allowed thousands of UK residents to order free COVID-19 tests or book vaccinations, and the rise of video consultations. Best forgotten are the several failed attempts to build a comprehensive track-and-trace mobile app.
most of the world is still in the grips of the pandemic, and the rise of the omicron variant seems to have pushed the finish line over the horizon. But healthcare leaders are already eyeing the future of UK health services and what recent adaptation and innovation might mean long term.
The current state of healthcare tech in the UK
Since it was founded in 1948, the NHS has provided healthcare to all legal UK residents, offering most healthcare services free. It is currently the second largest single-payer healthcare system in the world, with planned spending for the Department of Health and Social Care in England totalling £212.1 billion in 2020-21, up from £150.4 billion in 2019-20.
“… We’ve always been at the cutting edge of many different medical technologies,” said Dr. Annabelle Painter, a GP registrar who also holds a fellowship role for Health Education England and NHSX focused on AI and workforce. “But at the same time, the hardware infrastructure within the NHS has been really bad.”
Painter, who is also a clinical advisor to healthcare tech firms such as Medsii, said that despite campaigns by former health secretary Matt Hancock to “purge the pager” and “axe the fax,” legacy technology is still pervasive in the NHS.
“As a millennial growing up with a mobile in my hand from a very young age, going into the NHS and suddenly being asked to use a pager and a fax machine was overwhelming in many ways,” Painter said. “Firstly, how is the NHS still using this technology that I’ve literally never ever seen before? But also, I didn’t know how to use that technology.”
The lack of modern technology and inefficiencies in the system hampered good care, she said. “That was quite frustrating for me and … part of the reason I wanted to move into the digital health space was to try and help improve all of this.”
Despite the billions of pounds poured into the NHS, experts said years of underfunding left the health service in a vulnerable position that was only made worse by the pandemic. This year, NHS hospitals, mental health services, and community providers reported a shortage of 90,000 full-time staffers and as many as 39,000 nursing vacancies, or 1 in 10 posts. And as of October 2021, the British Medical Association reported that the NHS waiting list was at a record high 5.98 million — and still growing.
The role of legacy systems
The NHS has long been plagued by issues relating to legacy technology. The 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack, which infected devices running unpatched versions of Windows XP, affected at least 80 of 236 NHS trusts, forcing the cancellation of around 20,000 hospital appointments and operations and prompting five accident and emergency departments to divert their patients to other hospitals.
In April 2018, after the attack, the Department for Health and Social Care announced an agreement with Microsoft that saw NHS devices upgraded to Windows 10 for free. But as recently as February 2020, a month after Microsoft stopped patching Windows 7, around 500,000 NHS devices were still running on the outdated OS.
That said, the NHS is one of the strongest in tech investment compared to other countries in Western Europe, according to Silvia Piai, Research Director for IDC Health Insights in Europe. And the pandemic accelerated plans already being discussed.
“…I think that prior to COVID, we were in a bit of… [a] moment of reflection on how to use the technology,” she said, noting there was a lot of talk about digital transformation in healthcare. “[Covid-19] has accelerated many of those processes.”
She pointed to advances in remote care provisioning and clinical decision support and believes the experience of the pandemic will help the NHS better understand how to deploy emerging technologies and roll out new integrated care delivery models.
“For instance, everything we have learnt about telemedicine and virtual care could be really handy when it comes to deciding what is the level of access to services you want to offer and what kind of which segment of the population should we target with telemedicine. I think that’s the key takeaway from the pandemic,” she said.
“We know that healthcare is still a priority area in the UK, and they will need to make sure that lessons we’ve learnt are put it into practise.”
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