“The NHS deals with over a million patients every 36 hours and over 250 million interactions a year. Is a paper and postage system that can take months the most effective way of providing care today? In any other industry that volume of interaction would be ripe for digital transformation.”

The above is a quote last week from UK IT industry group Intellect, which last month published a report, The NHS Information Evolution, on the best way to end the information blockages in the NHS preventing the creation of a truly digital national healthcare system.

For too long, says the study, systems and services designed and implemented locally work well, but end up burying information, making it inaccessible to those on the outside. A much better idea: an architecture that allows information to flow horizontally and follow the patient.

The way to get there, Intellect suggests, is for the NHS to ‘punch’ through these silos, creating local innovation that can first extend ‘horizontally’ through Trusts, then to neighbouring hospitals – and eventually all the way ‘up,’ to regional or even national levels, to deliver common, standards-based national health apps for us all to benefit from.

The great news is that for an increasing number of NHS customers, that vision is becoming a reality. Our VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive) platform is doing just that – extending proven PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) to form the basis of a new generation of EPR (Electronic Patient Records) in hospital Trusts. This implements the Intellect idea by establishing a route to national NHS IT systems by starting bottom up, but with a strategic goal in mind.

Read the full article here, in Publictechnology.net