Link consumer tech to health IT – Newton

More interoperability is needed between consumer health technology and NHS systems, Public Health England’s chief innovation officer has argued.

John Newton told the Healthcare Efficiency Through Technology expo in London that apps, wearable technology and patient-held records all hold promise, but only if they can interact with the systems used in healthcare.

“There is a complete lack of integration between technology for health and well-being and those that operate for healthcare IT systems.

“These need to be brought together,” he said, adding that better integration methods and better standards are needed for this to happen.

“Standards need to be simple and easy to implement. They need to be designed by the people that implement them if possible. There is so much more we can do to make standards easy to use,” he said.

PHE is an executive agency of government, sponsored by the Department of Health. It is charged with “protecting and improving the nation’s health and wellbeing, and reduce health inequalities.”

At the moment, it is probably best known for public health marketing campaigns, such as ‘Stoptober’, which encourages smokers to give up smoking for a month.

Newton said such campaigns are expensive to run, but very successful. However, he argued that in the longer term the NHS needs to have “three adult conversations” about health and technology.

The first is with patients about how the health service can “support [them] to take responsibility for their health and care.”

“Technology can do that in ways we’ve only started to talk about,” he said. The second is about how to give health and social care professionals the data they need to reflect on what they are doing and how to improve.

And the third is with industry, and “how to enable them to help us to implement these changes.”

“I think there are too many technology driven solutions, in which people are trying to find a use for their technology, instead of seeing where technology can help,” he said, adding that proper evaluations are also needed.

“There aren’t enough evaluations of hard outcomes. If we are going to roll out technology across the country, we need to know it works, that it is cost effective, and that it improves patient care,” he said.  

Other speakers at the expo focused on the need for the NHS to use technology to increase efficiency, given the risk that the gap between flat funding and increasing costs and demand could reach £30 billion by 2020.

Will Cavendish, the Department of Health’s relatively new director general of innovation, growth and technology, echoed comments by Health and Social Care Information Centre chair, Kinglsey Manning, that these pressures were not going to go away, whatever the outcome of the political debate about the NHS’ future.

 “The question of the overall funding of the NHS is up in lights at the moment,” Cavendish said. “The overall spending challenges remain problematic, and the relationship between health and the rest of the public sector is tense.

“Health technology and innovation are a necessity for us here in the NHS, and not just something that is desirable.”