The Plug-In: Delivering on digital health commitments

The NHS Long Term Plan set out key commitments to enhancing the digital capabilities of the NHS between the time it was published in 2019 through to 2024, when it claimed every patient in England would be able to access digital-first primary care.

These eight digital milestones were intended to outline exactly how the NHS would spend the extra funding promised to open a desperately needed digital front door to the health service and pull it into the 21st Century.

Yet more than one year since the Long Term Plan’s publication, little in the way of updates have been provided by NHS England on the delivery of these milestones, or the likelihood of them being achieved on time.

Meanwhile, at least one deadline has passed by without much in the way of acknowledgement from NHS England, while others – such as April 2020’s Axe the Fax deadline – look almost guaranteed to be missed owing to a lack of direction from the centre.

Digital Health’s latest edition of the Plug-In offers an update on NHS England’s Long Term Plan ambitions, as well as other digital targets that were due to be delivered over the course of 2019-2021.

The Plug-In is a monthly insight report from Digital Health that is exclusively available to subscribers of Digital Health Intelligence, previous issues have focused on NHSX and the GP IT Futures framework.

Digital Health Intelligence provides granular-level, census-based data about the healthcare technologies across all UK NHS trusts.

This business information resource includes data about:

• Some 70 clinical systems, their vendors and contract dates
• Infrastructure and cyber security
• A data toolkit to explore Market share by clinical system and the Clinical Digital Maturity Index penetration data
• CDMI details on a per-trust basis – to reflect a trust’s digital maturity/move towards paperless
• Supplier details: A database of some 700 vendors with details of solutions provided to each trust
• Incisive industry reports

To subscribe, go to https://www.digitalhealthintelligence.com/ and click ‘Register today’.