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.”
