Scottish govt recasts e-health strategy

张琨

Scottish govt recasts e-health strategy
13 September 2011   Shanna Crispin

The Scottish Government has published an e-health strategy for the next six years that focuses on five new strategic health aims.

The strategy mandates all health boards to use information and technology to maximise efficiency and savings; enable people to communicate with NHS Scotland; contribute to care integration; improve the availability of information; and improve the safety of people taking medicines.

Speaking at the opening of the Health Informatics Scotland conference in Edinburgh, acting director general of health and chief executive of NHS Scotland, Derek Feeley, said the government expected all health boards to prove they were delivering on the aims by the end of 2014.

"It's not optional for people to select out of those five. We expect boards to make progress on all five - but how they do that is up to them."

The strategy sets out nine key deliverables for both the government and health boards to help deliver the strategy's aims.

These include health boards making plans to replace paper systems with digital processes such as digital dictation, scanning and voice recognition, and to start using clinical portals to improve the information available to healthcare workers.

At the same time, the government has promised to review the electronic contact people have with NHS Scotland, and to develop a national strategy to provide a 'coherent and citizen centered framework' for such contact.

It has also committed to developing a separate IT strategy focused on health and social care collaboration and integration, which Feeley said was necessary as the country's population aged.

"We've never had that before; that area of cross-governmental working between the NHS and local authorities has not been felt with success in the past.

“So we need a new focus on that given that one of the key policy priorities of this government is integrating health and social care."

The government also stipulated that it would roll out specific care summaries for every person living with a long term condition.

The deliverables are presented as part of the 2011 Scottish Spending Review and will be reassessed in 2014. New deliverables will then be set in line with the next spending review.

Feeley said the nine key deliverables should be showing up in health board processes by 2014 and "in the bank" ready for the next set of deliverables.

"[But] they won’t all happen in 2014 - you'll see some of these happening pretty quickly," he told the conference.

"The strategy is not a complete U-turn, it's not a change of direction, it's meant to help make progress and to accelerate progress."

The strategy is the second that the Scottish government has produced on e-health, and has taken a wider view of benefits and outcomes than the first strategy, which focused more on technology, products and suppliers.

"We think it's the right strategy, we think it takes us in the right direction. We've got a clear sense of what we need to prioritise. We're at the stage now I think where we've got no excuses, we need to press on and implement this" Feeley said.

The strategy commits to supporting work already completed through the first 2008-11 strategy on the unique patient identifier number, PACS, emergency care summary and the common GP IT system.