Parliamentary under-secretary of state at the DHSC, Dr Zubir Ahmed, told the Healthcare Excellence Through Technology (HETT) show, which took place at London ExCeL at the start of October, that he was ‘restless for change'.
He said he could see huge potential for digital, but the challenge now is delivery, he said, ‘and to get this technology into the hands of the many, not the few'.
Alec Price-Forbes, the national chief clinical information officer at NHS England, said the NHS should be ‘digital by default'. He said it will not be enough to extend digital tools into existing workflows, ‘we need to see digital used to transform services', he stressed.
Ming Tang, interim chief digital and information officer at NHS England, said three big national projects will underpin change across the system: the NHS App, the single patient record and the Federated Data Platform.
Tang said: ‘It is all coming together and now we need to make sure we work together to ensure we can do all the things we want.'
Ayub Bhayat, director of data services and deputy chief data and analytics officer at NHS England, told delegates that three prototypes of the Single Patient Record are being developed: one following a ‘hub and spoke' model leveraging existing investments in shared care records; one built around a ‘central model'; and one based on a ‘data layer'.
In addition, Liz Clow, director of digital products at NHS England, said that there are three priorities. These include developing ‘intelligent triage', building the digital hospital and NHS Online, and, more immediately, rolling out HPV self-service screening for women who may not access traditional screening services.
Sonia Patel, chief information officer at NHS England, outlined a streamlined relationship between the centre, regions, and the frontline, underpinned by a new ‘public digital infrastructure,' and the creation of a flexible, standards-based blueprint for the deployment of technology to support new models of care.
Out on the exhibition floor, HETT debuted new features to bring visitors closer to suppliers and innovators. One of the busiest was the AI spotlight, which gave vendors and customers the chance to reflect on the implementation of what is still very new technology.
