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Found 463 results
  1. Content Article
    This cohort study examined whether sociodemographic characteristics affected patient access to and use of patient health care portals during the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors found significant disparities in portal use by sex, age, multimorbidity and health literacy were found. While disparities by sex and age decreased and were no longer statistically significant by 2021, disparities by multimorbidity remained consistent throughout the pandemic and disparities by health literacy were exacerbated.
  2. News Article
    “What if I told you one of the strongest choices you could make was the choice to ask for help?” says a young, twentysomething woman in a red sweater, before recommending that viewers seek out counselling. This advert, promoted on Instagram and other social media platforms, is just one of many campaigns created by the California-based company BetterHelp, which offers to connect users with online therapists. The need for sophisticated digital alternatives to conventional face-to-face therapy has been well established in recent years. If we go by the latest data for NHS talking therapy services, 1.76 million people were referred for treatment in 2022-23, while 1.22 million actually started working with a therapist in person. While companies like BetterHelp are hoping to address some of the barriers that prevent people from seeking therapy, such as a dearth of trained practitioners in their area, or finding a therapist they can relate to, there is a concerning side to many of these platforms. Namely, what happens to the considerable amounts of deeply sensitive data they gather in the process? Moves are now under way in the UK to look at regulating these apps, and awareness of potential harm is growing. Last year, the UK’s regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), began a three-year project, funded by the charity Wellcome, to explore how best to regulate digital mental health tools in the UK, as well as working with international partners to help drive consensus in digital mental health regulations globally. Holly Coole, senior manager for digital mental health at the MHRA, explains that while data privacy is important, the main focus of the project is to achieve a consensus on the minimum standards for safety for these tools. “We are more focused on the efficacy and safety of these products because that’s our role as a regulator, to make sure that patient safety is at the forefront of any device that is classed as a medical device,” she says. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 4 February 2024
  3. Content Article
    Expecting paramedics to wade through shared care records is unsafe and inefficient. In an emergency, access to essential information has to be easy and fast, writes Claire Jones from NHS England South West. Whilst ambulance services may need access to the entire longitudinal record, it is imperative that in those first vital minutes of an emergency they have the most pertinent and relevant data at their fingertips. In such cases, information sharing can be a matter of life or death. We should make it as easy as possible for emergency care providers to access and view relevant information about the person in their care.
  4. Content Article
    ECRI's Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2024 list identifies the potential sources of danger ECRI believe warrant the greatest attention this year and offers practical recommendations for reducing risks. Since its creation in 2008, this list has supported hospitals, health systems, ambulatory surgery centres and manufacturers in addressing risks that can impact patients and staff. 
  5. News Article
    New digital prescriptions mean NHS App users in England can now collect medication from a pharmacy without having to visit a GP or health centre. The usual paper slip given by doctors has been replaced by an in-app barcode, which can be scanned at any pharmacy. Users can already request repeat prescriptions on the app - and every digital order fulfilled will save the GP three minutes, NHS Digital says. It comes after a trial last year, involving more than a million users. Patients can use the app to check what medicines they have been prescribed, and when. Anyone who has a nominated pharmacy can continue to collect medication without a paper prescription or barcode, as the details are sent to their pharmacy electronically. Read full story Source: BBC News, 30 January 2024
  6. News Article
    NHS England said it had opened a tender worth £16 million to support provider organisations as they seek to improve their digital maturity and get electronic patient records in place by the end of March 2026. NHSE said its frontline digitisation programme is working with NHS secondary care trusts providing acute specialist, community, mental health and ambulance services to help them reach a minimum level of digital capability as defined by the Digital Capabilities Framework. To fulfil this ambition, NHSE is seeking a partner to create an experienced, multi-skilled, rapid response intervention service, also known as a Tiger Teams service, capable of supporting EPR delivery across England. This service will be an expansion to an existing comprehensive support offer available to providers, designed to support the national demand for resource, expertise, and information necessary to successfully rollout EPRs. NHSE said: “Often during EPR delivery, there is a requirement for either a planned, or unplanned, specific, time-bound skill set, capable of providing a set of deliverables, problem rectification or other specialist intervention for an element of the EPR Programme. “Trusts are finding it increasingly challenging to obtain good quality, skilled short-term resources, both from the recruitment and contingent labour market.” Read full story Source: Digital Health, 22 January 2024
  7. Event
    until
    Airedale’s digital journey: Revolutionising healthcare Starting in 2006, Airedale NHS Foundation Trust digitized patient services, introducing remote health assessments for prisoners. Facing funding challenges for successful pilots, 2010 saw the establishment of the Digital Care Hub with Rachel Binks serving as a key consultant. In 2014, the 24/7 Goldmine service emerged, supporting those in their last year of life with telephonic and video assistance. Goldmine, now a decade strong, is acclaimed for enabling patients to spend their final days at home, supported by grateful families and caregivers. Expanding beyond end-of-life care, MyCare24 was born in 2023 through a joint venture, enhancing service delivery and marketing capabilities nationwide. Airedale NHS Foundation Trust’s digital journey signifies innovation, compassion, and a commitment to reshape healthcare for the future, ensuring tangible, positive impacts on patient care. Register
  8. News Article
    More than 8,500 patients in England were being treated on virtual wards in the run-up to Christmas, figures have revealed, as the NHS moves to ease pressures on hospital capacity. However, experts said the so-called hospitals at home are not a “silver bullet to solve the crisis in health and social care”. Figures published by NHS Digital revealed some 8,586 patients were treated virtually in December 2023, up from 7,886 in November. The snapshot was taken on 21 December 2023, meaning it is likely those patients spent Christmas on a virtual ward rather than an actual hospital. Virtual wards allow patients to receive care in their own homes, with clinical staff using apps or wearable technology to monitor them remotely. Professor Sir Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, said the “rapid expansion” of virtual wards beds and patients “is a real NHS success story”. He added: “This not only frees up vital hospital beds for those who need them most but ensures patients can recover in the place they are most comfortable with support from families, carers and friends, and while occupancy has been growing rapidly as NHS teams make the most of all bed capacity available, we want to see continued growth right across the country so as many patients as possible can benefit." However, Wendy Preston, the head of nursing practice at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said “virtual wards aren’t a silver bullet to solve the crisis in health and social care”. “Whether they’re in a physical bed or on a virtual ward, patients still need to be able to see a nurse,” she added. “But there are over 40,000 nursing vacancies across the NHS, and social care is chronically understaffed. Run effectively, virtual wards can relieve pressure, but on every single shift nursing staff are fighting an uphill battle to care for too many patients. “If the UK government wants to turn around the state of the NHS and deliver the ‘hospital level’ care at home that patients expect, nursing staff need to see game-changing investment in the workforce.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 15 January 2024
  9. News Article
    “Better upfront planning, training and testing” were needed in a tech launch which was tied to patient harm and service disruption, an NHS England review has found. Royal Surrey and Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals foundation trusts went live with Oracle Cerner’s electronic patient record in May 2022 – under a programme called Surrey Safe Care – but the implementation has since been linked to incidents of patient harm, including one death, and significant disruption to trust services. Now, a lessons learned review, carried out by NHSE’s frontline digitisation team and obtained by HSJ via a Freedom of Information request, has identified 24 areas of improvement. The key lessons cited by the review are “better upfront planning, roles and responsibilities, training and testing”. It recommended that, in future implementations, trust boards should be supported by others experienced with implementing EPRs within the NHS to “aid board level decisions and ‘what questions to ask when’”, while clearer responsibilities should also be agreed upon for programme leads and EPR suppliers. The review also found the content of training must be evaluated thoroughly, while the EPR supplier should provide “upfront and continuous training”. It added the “full end-to-end testing [by] representatives from all end user groups” should be completed before go-live. It also said EPR readiness needs to incorporate “data readiness, such as data quality, and mapping how data has originally been captured [which] may impact reporting and organisational readiness”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 15 January 2024 Related reading on the hub: NHS England warns electronic patient record could pose ‘serious risks to patient safety’: what can we learn?
  10. News Article
    NHS trusts are sharing intimate details about patients’ medical conditions, appointments and treatments with Facebook without consent and despite promising never to do so. An Observer investigation has uncovered a covert tracking tool in the websites of 20 NHS trusts which has for years collected browsing information and shared it with the tech giant in a major breach of privacy. The data includes granular details of pages viewed, buttons clicked and keywords searched. It is matched to the user’s IP address – an identifier linked to an individual or household – and in many cases details of their Facebook account. Information extracted by Meta Pixel can be used by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, for its own business purposes – including improving its targeted advertising services. Records of information sent to the firm by NHS websites reveal it includes data which – when linked to an individual – could reveal personal medical details. It was collected from patients who visited hundreds of NHS webpages about HIV, self-harm, gender identity services, sexual health, cancer, children’s treatment and more. It also includes details of when web users clicked buttons to book an appointment, order a repeat prescription, request a referral or to complete an online counselling course. Millions of patients are potentially affected. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 27 May 2023
  11. Content Article
    NHS England recently issued a national patient safety alert to all trusts providing maternity services after faults were discovered in IT software that could pose “potential serious risks to patient safety”. In this short blog, Clive Flashman, Patient Safety Learning’s Chief Digital Officer, calls for a closer look at the reasons into this and what we can learn from it.
  12. Content Article
    In its 75th anniversary year, the strains on the NHS are all too clear, with demand from an ageing population increasing, while the number of patients treated is still lower than before the pandemic. The Chancellor recently announced the “most ambitious productivity review ever undertaken by government”, yet it is unclear how to bring about the necessary productivity improvements in the NHS to meet the challenges of the future.  For the 2023 REAL challenge lecture, Professor Dame Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, explored some of the key drivers of UK healthcare productivity and discuss what we might hope the NHS will look like when it reaches its centenary. You can watch the video of the lecture and download the slides below.
  13. Content Article
    The health service is facing workforce shortages and growing backlogs of care, as well as future increases in demand. In response, policymakers and providers are looking to advances in health technologies and data to improve quality and efficiency and reshape services to better meet future needs – most recently with the announcement of £100m to advance the use of artificial intelligence in health care. Ensuring new uses of health technologies or data have the backing of the public is critical if these are to become business as usual. As seen with the care.data scheme and the General Practice Data for Planning and Research programme, lack of public support can significantly constrain innovation and service transformation. So how does the UK public feel about the use of health technologies and health data? To explore this further, in March 2023 the Health Foundation commissioned a nationally representative public survey to investigate attitudes towards health technology and data uses and the key factors affecting these views.
  14. Content Article
    In this blog, journalist Rory Cellan-Jones reflects on some major challenges the NHS currently faces. Sharing insights from a recent meeting with medtech companies and a lecture by economist Professor Diane Coyle, he shares concerns that productivity in the health service has decreased as a result of the pandemic, and that medtech companies face barriers in selling their solutions to the NHS. He highlights a growing consensus that policymakers need to think beyond immediate firefighting and look at how to transform the NHS over the long term.
  15. Content Article
    The NHS’s deal with the US tech company Palantir raises privacy concerns, but a unified database could be a medical gamechanger writes Martha Gill in an article for the Observer. Governments have been trying to stitch together our patchwork system for decades. Billions have been lost in these attempts. However, they always run up against the same problem: people just don’t want to share their medical data, even when assured it will be anonymised. When the government aimed to build a collection of anonymous GP health records, around a million patients opted out. The latest of these attempts has closed a loophole: patients cannot now opt out. But this has enraged civil liberties groups, which are concerned about the company chosen to merge, clean and provide tools for sorting through the data.
  16. Content Article
    In May 2021, the Irish public health service was the target of a cyber-attack. The response by the health service resulted in the widespread removal of access to ICT systems. While services including radiology, diagnostics, maternity and oncology were prioritised for reinstatement, recovery efforts continued for over four months. This study describes the response of health service staff to the loss of ICT systems and the risk mitigation measures introduced to safely continue health services. It also explores the resilience displayed by frontline staff whose rapid and innovative response ensured continuity of safe patient care.
  17. Content Article
    Digital health inequality, observed as differential utilisation of digital tools between population groups, has not previously been quantified in the NHS. But recent developments in universal digital health interventions, including a national smartphone app and online primary care services, allow measurement of digital inequality across a nation. This study in BMJ Health & Care Informatics aimed to measure population factors associated with digital utilisation across 6356 primary care providers serving the population of England. The authors concluded that the study results are concerning for technologically driven widening of healthcare inequalities. They highlight the need for targeted incentives to digital in order to prevent digital disparity from becoming health outcomes disparity.
  18. Content Article
    Retrospective chart review is the standard for estimating prevalence of adverse events. Manual review of the electronic health record (EHR) is resource intensive. This study from Garzón González et al. describes the construction and validation of electronic trigger set, TriggerPrim, to rapidly identify charts with potential adverse events in primary care. The resulting set has five triggers: ≥3 appointments in a week at the PC center, hospital admission, hospital emergency department visit, prescription of major opioids, and chronic benzodiazepine treatment in patients 75 years or older. Use of TriggerPrim reduced time in the EHR by half.
  19. News Article
    The NHS has sparked controversy by handing the US spy tech company Palantir a £330m contract to create a huge new data platform, leading to privacy concerns around patients’ medical details. The move immediately prompted concerns about the security and privacy of patient medical records and the suitability of Palantir to be given access to and oversight of such sensitive material. NHS England has given Palantir and four partners including Accenture a five-year contract to set up and operate the “federated data platform” (FDP). The British Medical Association, which had previously voiced concern about the NHS’s alleged lack of scrutiny of bidders on “ethical” grounds, said Palantir’s winning bid was “deeply worrying”. NHS England sought to allay such concerns. It stressed that none of the companies in the winning consortium would be able to access health and care data without its explicit consent; that it would retain control of all data within the platform; and that it would not include GP data. It said the new software would be protected by the highest possible standards of security through the deployment of “privacy enhancing technology”. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 21 November 2023
  20. Content Article
    A service providing bilingual medication information is helping to reduce healthcare inequalities and medical errors. Pharmacies across London are benefitting from the support of Written Medicine; a service providing bilingual dispensing labels in patients’ language of choice.
  21. Content Article
    Health at a Glance provides a comprehensive set of indicators on population health and health system performance across OECD members and key emerging economies. These cover health status, risk factors for health, access to and quality of healthcare, and health system resources. Analysis draws from the latest comparable official national statistics and other sources. Alongside indicator-by-indicator analysis, an overview chapter summarises the comparative performance of countries and major trends. This edition also has a special focus on digital health, which measures the digital readiness of OECD countries’ health systems, and outlines what countries need to do accelerate the digital health transformation.
  22. News Article
    The NHS requires a ‘new central investment’ to achieve digital maturity and realise the potential of emerging technologies, according to the person who was commissioned by Jeremy Hunt to examine the issue in 2015. Bob Wachter was commissioned by the then health and social care secretary in 2015, and authored the 2016 report Making IT Work, which called on all NHS trusts to achieve the “realistic target” of a good level of digital maturity by 2023. While Professor Wachter told HSJ that there had been “reasonably good” progress, he said it was “not quite what I would have hoped for” seven years on from his report. He acknowledged that factors such as the pandemic and the subsequent economic situation slowed progress, but added that he was “a little bit worried” at the state of digital maturity in some areas, including interoperability and reliability of key systems such as electronic patient records. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 1 November 2023
  23. Content Article
    In late 2015, the National Advisory Group on Health Information Technology in England was formed to advise the Department of Health and NHS England on its efforts to digitise the secondary care system. Our recommendations fall into two broad categories: 10 overall findings and principles, followed by 10 implementation recommendations.
  24. News Article
    Millions of patients will be handed the power to view their own medical records and test results online after the NHS overruled opposition from the doctors’ union. From 1 November every GP surgery in England will be contractually obliged to give all patients over the age of 16 access to their health information on their phones. It means patients will no longer have to ring up their surgery or book a GP appointment to get details of blood test results, medications and repeat prescriptions, but instead they can access them by logging in to the NHS app. The British Medical Association (BMA) had threatened to go to court over the plans, arguing that granting people access to their records would add to GP workloads and could put patients at risk. However, Jacob Lant, the chief executive of the charity umbrella group National Voices, said: “Ensuring everyone has access to their own medical records through the NHS app is an important step in building a more equal partnership between patients and clinicians. “It gives people much easier access to the information they need to prepare for appointments, and having quick access to test results can help patients manage their conditions better. Using technology in this way has the potential to help millions, and free up capacity of staff to help those who are less able to make use of digital services.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 31 October 2023
  25. Content Article
    Data-driven health systems is the term we use to refer to technologies that collect, process, and analyse data about people to present health information in new ways, make predictions, or reach a particular outcome.  Over three years, the Ada Lovelace Institute, in partnership with the Health Foundation, explored how the accelerated adoption of data-driven systems and digital health services interact with health inequalities in the UK.
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