Fantastic Data and Where to Find It

The Ulster Medical Society grants to all users on the basis of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence the right to alter or build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creation is licensed under identical terms. When I was a Junior House Officer in the old RVH back in the mid-1990s I thought digital technology was on the cusp of completely revolutionising healthcare. I wrote a program for my Psion organiser called " WardRound " that allowed me and some of my colleagues to track our patients and their results and to electronically manage handovers, tasks and theatre lists. It was effectively an electronic health record system in our white coat pocket alongside our Oxford Handbook-and we did make some preliminary explorations with the publisher into trying to digitise that too... Over two decades later, IT has led to some considerable improvements in how we deliver care, but we've unleashed a magical menagerie of systems that, while they work well within their narrow area, are often difficult to get to play nicely together. The data within these systems largely stays locked away, out of reach of other systems and divorced from the patient. When we've created interfaces, integration engines and messaging standards, those workarounds have tended to be partial, costly to set up and maintain and prone to error and miscommunication. It's ironic that in a modern healthcare system, where many of our treatments and diagnostic modalities are at the technological cutting edge, we're still massively reliant on paper charts, Post-It notes, corridor conversations and custom-and-practice to provide the glue that binds it all together. And then there are the IT systems and procurement processes that don't work well, and arguably get in the way of patient care. 1 recognised that in order for our Health & Social Care System to survive, we need to transform how we deliver services. The " Quadruple Aim " of healthcare calls for: improving patient experience of care, improving the health of the population, achieving better value by reducing the per capita cost of health care, and improving staff experience. This means substantial process redesign, and digitising the patient record is an inescapable component of that. Professionals need better information. Patients need to be better enabled to manage their own health. For this to work we need to break down the barriers between our multitudinous …