Industry News
The UK NHS Needs to Embrace the “Technology Revolution” The NHS needs to follow banking and shopping and embrace a “technology revolution,” which will allow far more tailored and personal patient care, the UK’s Health Secretary has said. Jeremy Hunt said the health service has “barely scratched” the surface of potential advances, and fallen far behind major industries. Speaking at a conference in Manchester, he said the NHS needed to learn from retail, banking and travel industries which had drastically cut their costs while improving customer service. Mr Hunt told delegates: “I believe that we have only barely scratched the technology revolution that is about to hit everything we do in healthcare and particularly everything that happens inside the NHS.” He said he believed the health service was on the “cusp of one of the most exciting changes in delivery of heal care that will ever happen in our lifetimes”. The Health Secretary said the NHS needed to learn from other sectors, such as retail, with one in five Christmas presents now bought online, and 500 per cent increase in the number of people who bought Christmas presents on tablets last year. “If you look at banking, half of people do their banking online, that rises to three quarters of under 35s,” Mr Hunt said. “The retail banks have actually cut a third of their costs by persuading us to do all the work that they used to do.” He said a revolution in the budget air industry had been possible because of technology, with 70 per cent of ticket sales now made online.
we face we inevitably have to accept that our care will become less personal and less high quality than we have been used to.” “Technology will help us do exactly the opposite, it will help make care more personal, more tailored, more in tune with our demands as an increasingly affluent and demanding population,” he said.
“You look at those changes and you think of what is possible in our NHS, and I think we are on the cusp of one of the most exciting changes in delivery of healthcare that will ever happen in our lifetimes,” Mr Hunt said.
Speaking at the Health and Care Innovation Expo, the Health Secretary said technology would mean increasing use of apps to help those with long-term conditions manage their care, with more use of online booking of appointments, as well as medical consultations online.
“The biggest myth that technology can help us to bust is this idea that because of financial pressure, because of the ageing population, because of the huge challenges
Read the full article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/ healthnews/10676615/Jeremy-Hunt-NHS-needs-to-learn-fromonline-banking.html
16 April 2014