More than 13.5 million hours of doctors’ time is being lost each year in England due to delays resulting from inadequate or malfunctioning IT systems and equipment, according to a new report from the British Medical Association (BMA).
Titled Getting IT Right: A Prescription for Safe, Modern Healthcare, the report calls for investment in IT to be protected from budget cuts and increase long term.
In a survey that attracted 1,320 responses, BMA found that 80% of doctors said improving IT infrastructure and digital technology would help to deal with the massive backlogs in the NHS.
A higher proportion of 87% said remote monitoring and care of patients will be a key feature in the next 10 years, but only 24% said their hospitals had adequate infrastructure. 74% would prioritise being software up to date, 72% would do the same for inefficient hardware, 74% would focus on the interoperability of primary and secondary care systems, and 76% said sharing data between systems was important.
Only 11% of respondents said they had all the hardware needed to carry out their roles, and 47% said they had it only sometimes, rarely or not at all. 30% said the software they used was rarely adequate or inadequate, while only 4% said it was completely adequate.
In secondary care 57% of doctors reported delays in accessing data from primary care with 82% saying it happens always or very often.
Streamline and consolidate
The report says that software and systems should be streamlined and/or consolidated where possible and that IT providers should engage more with healthcare staff to understand needs. This could work partly through IT user groups in NHS trusts flagging up any issues.
“This clearly shows that seamless sharing of information is far from being addressed and, while some of this may be caused by other reasons, such as a lack of digitisation or high clinician workload, the lack of interoperability has an important role to play,” it says.
It also recommends the development of standards for interoperability that should be enforced on suppliers, and that doctors with an interest in digital transformation should be offered leadership roles in the field.
The report also calls for any improvements in patient-centred IT initiatives be safe and avoid creating health inequalities through digital exclusion, and inform patients about how their data is being used. This might involve digital inclusion strategies, offering internet access in deprived areas, keeping non-digital access methods available and transparency over how data is collected, stored and used.
“Now is the time to invest,” the report concludes, noting: “Health services and healthcare delivery across the UK have changed fundamentally over the course of the pandemic.”
