EXC: Hancock to reveal NHSX ‘will be the bridge between tech and health’
- 13 March 2019
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is to reveal in a speech later today his plans for the newly announced NHSX organisation.
Speaking at the Digital Health Technology Show in London, Matt Hancock is expected to set out his vision for the newest addition to the NHS family – which has been tasked with overseeing technology transformation across health and social care.
In his keynote speech, Hancock is expected say that he hopes NHSX will “be the bridge between the worlds of healthcare and technology” and will reveal that the X stands for “user experience”.
He adds: “We’re setting up NHSX for two reasons. First, because our tech leadership is just too diffuse, and that’s got in the way of tech transformation.
“So NHSX will bring together our tech leadership into one decision-making point. But it’s not just about the organogram.
“The other reason is that I want to bring the culture, the openness, the productivity, and the speed of iteration of the internet to the way we deliver tech in health and care.”
Technology standards in healthcare is a subject which Hancock has focussed on and formed a big part of his “tech vision” – especially the possibility of having mandatatory open standards.
Building on this, Hancock is expected to say in his speech that he wants the NHS to have a minimum “standards-led approach” which will allow “local NHS teams buy whatever they want from whoever they want”.
On the otehr side, Hancock is also expected to reveal his plans to publish these standards on the internet so “anyone who wants to write code for the NHS can see what our needs are before they begin”.
He is due to say: “I’ve said I want to help make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a healthtech business.
“I want to spread your innovations much faster, taking on ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome.
“If you jump through all the hoops to sell into one trust, you shouldn’t have to repeat the whole process again with another trust just up the road.
“I want our systems to be capable of continuous upgrades as new tech develops.”
8 Comments
Let’s face it, given the current state of the Government, Hancock’s half-life is probably measured in minutes. Expect a new SoS before too long with another set of great ideas.
As a patient currently undergoing quite traumatic treatments at the hand of the NHS, I have to say that my user eXperience reveals rather basic flaws.
1 It would be nice if NHS staff, particularly Consultants’ secretaries answered their telephones and responded to patients’ requests.
2. It would be even nicer if their telephones had answering machines, so a patient could leave messages.
3. It would nicest if they were advanced enough to have email addresses.
4. It would also be amazing if hospitals ten miles apart could pass my medical records electronically between each other.
So NHSX will have a comfortably low base-line to start from.
Or silly me, perhaps by USER eXperience, Matt Hancock means clinician experience, nurse eXperience Manager eXperience, but not, absolutely not patient eXperience.
Three sets of barriers for new entrants.
1) The informatics – Health data and processes are complex
2) Regulatory – Clinical safety and Information governance create some unnecessary but mainly necessary barriers DCB 0129, DCB 0160, MDD, GPRD etc.
3) Culture – NHS are very conservative and risk averse with procurement processes that are interpenetrate to start-ups.
Open platforms can remove some of these barriers and lower others
Still procurement rules to negotiate….
I think the sentiment is right though
I welcome what Matt Hancock is trying to do and there lots of good stuff in what he says and the Tech Vision he published early.
Doing it like the Internet is what I said in 2014 https://woodcote-consulting.com/lets-do-it-like-the-internet/ But we do have to recognise that the Internet mantra “‘move fast and break things” sits uneasily with the Hippocratic Oath’s ” “first, do no harm” when it comes to digital health.
And user experience was at the heart of what I said in 2013 https://woodcote-consulting.com/time-for-zero-tolerance/ It’s about time we built systems that support the process of care rather than frustrate frontline staff trying to deliver it.
But (and as they say everything before the “but” is bulls**t) Matt’s ambitions don’t align with the behaviour of the NHS which continues to spend billions on obsolete proprietary systems and failed to invest diddly-squat in response to Dr Tony Shannon’s and my plea for 1% for the 99% here on digitalhealth.net https://www.digitalhealth.net/2016/10/beyond-wachter-1-for-the-99/
As for making the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a healthtech business. There a long way to go – We have seen no new entrants to the UK digital health market in the last 25 years that have got to scale (i.e. no longer an SME)
Matt is right to bring together bright young things from the Internet together with young digital native clinicians and to focus on user experience, but the techies need to understand the complexity of digital health and the clinicians that there is a lot more to robust software engineering that you can learn at an NHS Hack Day.
This stuff is hard. Please don’t treat those of us who tell you this as enemies, we are you friends and want to help you succeed.
Please don’t let NHS X be what a cynical colleague told me it was yesterday “A lot of ‘happy clappies’ with a Twitter account and an empty GitHub repo”
Sounds great!
Isn’t that what NHSD’s remit is/was? X stands for patient eXperience!! Well I guess E had already been used, NHSPE isn’t very sXe. Will he be indicating the cost of this new body and the ROI he has factored in.
NHS Standards for MedTech / Digital Tech is a critical and welcome strategy – to lead the way to innovate – whilst protecting patients and staff from the learning curves of technologies embedding into the NHS but conceived elsewhere. Thank you and completely game changing times for us with NHSX. Looking forward to our 5 year view.
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