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Has NHS privacy faux pas set transformation and skills alarm bells ringing?

When the chief executive of a medical insurance company said recently that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is “under strain” and therefore “presents quite a few business opportunities,” it just confirmed what everyone knew already – that the NHS is perhaps facing its biggest crisis in its 75-year history. With official stats on patient waiting times not making great reading, it feels as though Britain’s biggest employer is lurching from one problem to another, while an unreasonable amount of hope is being placed on its digital transformation to solve problems.

No one said it was going to be easy. When NHS England merged with NHS Digital earlier this year, the idea was to create “a closer link between the collection and analysis of data to help drive improvement to patient outcomes,” said the press release. Technology and more specifically patient data, was going to be at the heart of transformation. So when in May, a report revealed that 20 NHS trusts have been sharing patient details with Facebook without consent, via the site’s advertising measurement tool Meta Pixel, it surely undermined trust.

Understandably, NHS England is defensive when it comes to handling patient data. An NHS spokesperson told ERP Today in a prepared statement that “most people are comfortable with their patient data being used to improve their individual care, to improve the health of others and to plan and improve services. The NHS always remains in control of patient data and no third party can access or use it for their own purposes.”

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ERP Today

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RPA’s day has come – the intelligent evolution of a productivity bot

Global spending on robotic process automation (RPA) software is expected to reach $2.9bn this year, according to Gartner, cementing the idea that the machines are here to take our jobs, but are thankfully focused on the boring, yet necessary repetitive tasks. But is this all about to change? Could RPA be about to be phased out, or does it still have a future?

According to Varsha Mehta, senior market research specialist at Gartner, providers of RPA software are now “pushing beyond a traditional single technology-focused offering to a more advanced suite of tools”. This includes low-code application platforms, process mining, task mining, decision modelling and integration platform as a service (iPaaS). The aim, suggests Mehta, is to create “hyper-automation-enabling platforms”.

Customers, understandably, want more bang for their buck. Big data has given organisations analytical headaches that, to a certain extent, are being eased by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But where artificial intelligence and machine learning give organisations insight into operational and market patterns, customer habits and financial modelling, for example, RPA provides the “how”.

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Computer Weekly

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BI not BS: how businesses are building futures with data analytics

here’s nothing quite like a bit of optimism. It can be infectious, at least in the hands of the right people. So it is interesting to see statistics from McKinsey, which reveal that global executives currently have a fairly optimistic view of their local economies, despite the ongoing struggle with Covid-19.

More than half of all executives surveyed say economic conditions in their own countries will be better six months from now, and they are also upbeat about their own companies’ profitability. Clearly they must know something, or maybe they are just being bullish, talking it up and hoping for the best.

For any business, building forecasts demands something a little bit more than a hunch. Whether it’s an understanding of market trends and product performance analysis, or building intelligence on internal performance, businesses need facts, not subjectivity. This is where business intelligence (BI) comes in, and this also where it can get a little complicated. Not that it’s stopped CIOs from investing in new tools. According to the Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO survey 2020, business intelligence (BI) is still a top strategic investment for businesses, with a quarter of CIOs surveyed claiming it sits in their top three most important tech investments.

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Computer Weekly

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