Health tech companies are watching this election like a hawk in the UK. Modernisation and digitisation are going to be an important streamlining aid to get the NHS waiting list down.
Bevin Manoy and Moyra Amess, Directors of healthcare intelligence and quality improvement services, CHKS, explained that the huge waiting lists are a self-perpetuating issue. The longer patients wait, the greater their acuity becomes, and the longer their treatment takes, and in this time the waiting list continues to grow and grow.
Healthcare communications expert Highland Marketing’s advisory board said: “Whichever party forms the next government will find a health and social care system facing enormous challenges.”
COVID-19 is not the whole story
COVID-19 was a huge blow to the NHS. Ryan Reed, Digital Transformation Expert from technology-driven business transformation company SPS, said: “The NHS is facing significant challenges from underlying deficits to lower productivity levels since COVID-19 and rising demand.”
As can be seen, COVID-19 was a hugely exacerbating factor for the current healthcare crisis, but this is not the sole reason. The story would not be complete without talking about funding since then.
General election campaigns can have a long-lasting impact on health services and the technology
The government told the NHS it would get “whatever it takes” to get through COVID-19. However, Highland’s advisory board explained that following the pandemic the NHS has been looking to get its funding back on the track it was on before the pandemic.
“As a result, for the past three years, the NHS has been allocated a funding settlement that would have been tight even if significant sums had not been earmarked for elective recovery,” the board said.
In fact, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that Government-financed healthcare expenditure in 2023 fell by 2.1% in real terms.
Reducing waiting lists and improving experiences with tech
At the end of the day, there are big debates as to the level and target of funding for the UK’s healthcare system. Many tech companies argue that the system could be hugely streamlined with technologies that could allow the NHS to do more with less.
SPS’s Reed emphasised that the future government’s focus must be on solutions that can deliver wholesale efficiencies. “[These] often involve collaboration with industry partners, rather than ‘quick fixes’ such as deploying an AI chat bot,” he said.
Steve Sawyer, Managing Director of Access HSC, a company providing software for health, local government, and care organisations across the UK, thought that many easy technologies hold a lot of potential. “Solutions such as remote monitoring and tech-enabled care (not just a social alarm button), which still have so much potential to help patients stay out of hospital, be discharged sooner and live independently, also have to be prioritised more.”
There should be an enforced mandate for suppliers to open up endpoints and provide comprehensive APIs for interconnectivity
Christopher Wright, CEO of Beetroot Digital Health Solutions, said: “A key priority for the next government is to efficiently and robustly scale these solutions, specifically remote monitoring and management tools that enable clinicians to continually assess and re-assess high-risk patients in the home or community and prioritise those who need to be seen sooner.”
These solutions often directly reduce waiting lists and improve patient experience.
The lack of sufficient modernisation and digitalisation of NHS healthcare facilities with these types of technologies is just one way that the budget is not being utilised most efficiently.
Dean Moody, Healthcare Services Director for patient entertainment systems expert Airwave Healthcare, explained that general election campaigns can have a long-lasting impact on health services and the technology they use. “A good example is the introduction of bedside TV and telephones to NHS hospitals.
This interoperability could be achieved with a cloud-first approach
This was a key feature of the NHS Plan that New Labour launched after the 1997 general election. The NHS Plan promised new hospitals and state-of-the-art facilities. But the patient pays model for bedside entertainment and communications was never popular and the units that deliver it have never been modernised.”
Moody thinks it would be great for this general election to see one of the parties promise to do away with the patient pays model, and to invest in today’s state-of-the-art technology. “That way, we could not only deliver entertainment, but information and digital services to patients, educating and engaging them to be partners in their own care,” he said.
Interoperability for a fragmented system
Part of the issue with executing a tech system in the NHS is enacting one that actually works well by itself and within the wider network. For this, the problems are often interoperability and data sharing problems.
Lee Francis, Sales and Marketing Director from Electronic Patient Record (EPR) Solution provider PatientSource, said that interoperability should be important to the next government, as well as ensuring digital solutions are suitably configurable and refined.
“There should be an enforced mandate for suppliers to open up endpoints and provide comprehensive APIs for interconnectivity,” Francis suggested. “Also, there should be appropriate support for NHS digital teams that are responsible for connecting vendors to the array of national systems such as NHS Spine.”
This will help break down the friction between services and care settings
The Highland board talked to its associates in health tech, who echoed this sentiment, pleading for the next administration to work with the health and med-tech industries to crack the “stubborn nut” of interoperability.
“This interoperability could be achieved with a cloud-first approach,” said Jane Rendall, Managing Director of imaging IT solutions provider Sectra UK and Ireland. “[This could] help to improve access to diagnostic tests, imaging and expertise.”
With a cloud-first approach and open endpoints, the tech experts think this will help to ensure that patient data is ubiquitous across solutions and frontline teams.
Access HSC’s Sawyer said: “Both Labour and the Conservatives have acknowledged the critical role of technology in health. And the NHS is already seeing benefits from the adoption of digital, such as the NHS App and the Frontline Digitisation programme, so now is the time to scale - quickly and effectively.”
Framework contracts and tender stipulations can make it hard for innovative start-ups to work with systems and trusts on valuable, cost-effective solutions
Launched by NHSE and the government in 2021, the Frontline Digitisation programme is supporting NHS Trusts to reach a core level of digitisation, as set out in its minimum digital foundations.
Ian Hogan, a CIO at the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust and Highland said: “These days, if you don’t have IT, nothing is going to be done. Everything requires access to records, or imaging, or test results.”
But these solutions need to work well too. Epson research from June 2024 found that poor technology is costing UK front line healthcare workers four million working days a year. Slow or non-functioning printers alone can waste hours of a healthcare worker’s time each week, time that could be spent with patients.
So the priority is not just a digital system, but an easy-to-use, well-functioning, interoperable one.
Data is key
On a similar but separate note, data is a factor that needs to be considered with digital.
Assad Tabet, Senior VP of Healthcare, UKI and Europe, for digital engineering and cloud-based expert Mastek, said: "Ahead of the general election, Mastek is calling all political parties to commit to cross-government data sharing to address data gaps in public health surveillance and drive local prevention efforts.”
Patient systems will never reach their full capabilities if they can’t streamline operations across the country, increasing interoperability and preventative ability.
Both environmental and genomic data can progress the mission to reduce health inequalities.
Data could make a significant impact on preventative care, which is in dire need at this time. The ONS found that preventative care represented around 8.2% of Government healthcare spending in 2022 compared with 14.1% in 2021. So it is seeing a major slump.
Time and time again, preventative care is cheaper than curative care. So if data could help the streamlined implementation of this, then this could be a significant cost saving for the sector.
Collecting this data could come in the form of an individual’s health and wellbeing in the form of environmental factors that can influence this. But also could go as far as genetics. Sectra’s Rendall said: “The new health and social care secretary should prioritise the integration of genomics into healthcare, leveraging the Genome UK strategy to offer personalised treatments and predict disease risks.”
Both environmental and genomic data can progress the mission to reduce health inequalities.
Data can also be used to monitor the outcomes of health interventions to establish what works and what does not. “None of this requires huge, new initiatives. If anything, it requires stability, and continuing to invest in the basics,” the CHKS Directors said.
Hard to win contracts?
Of course, a lot of these technologies already exist on offer from private companies. Companies that have to go through complex bid processes in order to win these contracts. A problem that some think needs to be changed to allow smaller companies to be able to compete.
The problem starts at the ICS level.
Vertex’s Goldie said that every health tech vendor will argue that the digitisation of the NHS must top the new health and social care secretary’s agenda
“ICSs need to be supercharged to deliver [digital services], to move beyond the theoretical strategy phase to commissioning solutions using an outcomes-based model and using budgets to connect the existing digital and data ‘dots’,” Access HSC’s Sawyer. “This will help break down the friction between services and care settings that often prevent providers from achieving the full value of the technology.”
The NHS App and Frontline Digitisation programme are proof it can work in the right conditions. “Building on this momentum in ways that maximise available innovation, will require a focus on modernising procurement approaches within the health service,” said Chris Goldie, CEO of Digital Solutions firm, Vertex UK. “Framework contracts and tender stipulations can make it hard for innovative start-ups to work with systems and trusts on valuable, cost-effective solutions.
A VIP - Very Important Problem
Vertex’s Goldie said that every health tech vendor will argue that the digitisation of the NHS must top the new health and social care secretary’s agenda. “Considerable progress in digital strategy and implementation has already been seen, especially in areas such as diagnostics,” he said.
So it can work. But the challenges are most definitely still there.
Jamie Whysall, Principal Head of Healthcare for IT consultancy Netcompany, said: “One of the biggest challenges in the NHS is how to do more with a finite amount of resource and budget - and to balance smart investments that can promote positive change in the short-term as well as elevate citizen and clinician experiences in the long-term.”
Whysall explained that though investment in new hospitals and large IT systems to bring it all together may seem like a heavy up-front investment, there are step-change approaches available today with proven success in mitigating risk, increasing productivity, and reducing waste costs.
Featured companies
- Companies:
- Airwave Europe
- PatientSource
- Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust
- Vertex in Healthcare
- CHKS
- SPS Global