NHS digitisation expected to cost up to £13bn – report
- 18 October 2018
Supporting digitisation in line with a forthcoming plan for the NHS is expected to cost up to £13 billion over the next five years, it has been reported.
Officials developing NHS England’s long term plan have estimated it will cost between £10.9bn and £12.9bn to support digitisation across 15 areas included within it.
The roughly £13 billion figure would, if eventually confirmed, be remarkably close to the headline figure of the troubled National Programme for IT that ran from 2003.
The estimate is believed to cover support programmes aimed at reducing health inequities, improving personalised care and developing IT architecture for integrated care systems over the next decade.
Theresa May laid out a five-year funding settlement for the NHS in June, when she proposed an additional £20bn a year would be made available to the health service by 2023 to secure its future.
In return, NHS leaders and stakeholders were tasked with identifying where efforts to improve the service should be focused and also asked to “ensure every penny is well spent”.
The figures are based on “official estimates” said to have been seen by HSJ.
Digitisation of all NHS providers is reported to have been identified as the biggest area earmarked for investment at £3bn, with this process potentially lasting until 2024.
HSJ reports this is followed by the cost of making improvements to IT infrastructure, priced at between £2.2bn and £3bn. Meanwhile, data-gathering and analytics – which will provide the foundation for much of the NHS’s ambitions around population health and AI – is expected to cost between £1.4bn and £2bn.
Maintaining current NHS systems up to and beyond 2021, including Spine and the cyber security operations centre, is expected to cost £3.2bn.
Ben Moody, head of health and social care at techUK, suggested that the £13 billion figure needed to be considered “in context”.
He told Digital Health News: “The government already committed £4.2 billion for NHS technology in 2016 and when you consider the scale of the NHS – 1 million patients every 36 hours; 1.8 million employees and a Department of Health and Social Care budget in excess of £120 billion – it actually seems conservative compared to the percentage of revenue other large organisations spend on digitisation.
“Clearly, we need more detail before jumping to conclusions – but a step change in both funding and approach to digitisation is needed just to get the NHS on a level playing field with other industries.”
An NHS Digital spokesperson told Digital Health that it was unable to comment on “leaked documents” and instead referred to a press statement, which suggested the estimated cost would fall as some proposals were dropped.
“Any figures being discussed at this stage are ambitious and in outline and as with any planning process, there will be a stage of collaboration, consultation and refinement before final figures are agreed,” the statement read.
4 Comments
The politicians set the vision for the people the nhs serves, they do not manage the nhs, politicians are all the same, their BUSINESS is power, the BUSINESS of the nhs is the provision of health and honest accounting of the finances, there has to be a vision and the nhs financial accounts must tally, the balance may be + or – but the accounts must tally. For nhs leaders to come up with a figure of £13 billion is bonkers, it’s MORE bonkers than the figure the politicians come up with … fragment the operational and the financial side of the nhs … but NOT the technical, because IT and DATA crosses boundaries … it’s the same if you are in the N,S,W or E. The service offered by the NHS is becoming more and more uneven, you can not blame the politicians, you can not ignore history, the IT has been badly managed by NHS England @ the national level, not the politicians … time for change ?
How ridiculous, this is tax payers money, the money of future generations, the NHS is filthy rich with data, DO SOMETHING WITH it, the NHS is lucky to have been given the best health data in the world, where has NHS IT gone wrong ? Stop the blame culture (i.e. blame the politicians, blame the IT suppliers, blame other suppliers, blame the private sector …) for the sake of future generations … turn the NHS into a business that can balance it’s books (either + or -) as qluickly as possible !
Careful we don’t mistake a shopping list for a budget.
Exactly.
It would also be interesting to compare and contrast the money “committed to NHS technology since 2016”, the actual spend on NHS technology and the amount diverted towards other worthy causes including winter pressures, Trust year end deficits and the largely unfunded recent NHS pay rise.
Past experience is that newly appointed Health Secretaries (of all political parties) make sweeping statements and have great visions but are light on delivery. This quote is from the http://www.gov.uk website dated 16th January 2013 “The NHS should go paperless by 2018 to save billions, improve services and help meet the challenges of an ageing population, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt will say today.” From my perspective as both a patient and a professional there still seems to be a lot of paper around – especially outside the GDE sites. It also lists some interesting milestones “On the way towards the 2018 goal, the Health Secretary wants to see: / By March 2015 – everyone who wishes will be able to get online access to their own health records held by their GP. / Adoption of paperless referrals – instead of sending a letter to the hospital when referring a patient to hospital, the GP can send an email instead.
/ Clear plans in place to enable secure linking of these electronic health and care records wherever they are held, so there is as complete a record as possible of the care someone receives.
/ Clear plans in place for those records to be able to follow individuals, with their consent, to any part of the NHS or social care system.
/ By April 2018 – digital information to be fully available across NHS and social care services, barring any individual opt outs.”
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