Today, Professor Iain Carpenter, co-director of the RCP’s Health Informatics Unit, has responded to a written ministerial statement on the proposed devolution of NHS IT leadership to local organisations:
Taking the decision to align IT systems more closely with the needs of the front line is a good idea in theory. The real challenge though will rest in making sure that we get the right health informatics structures in place. One of the dirty secrets of the NHS is the regrettable state of medical record keeping. Earlier reports have shown that this compromises patient safety and clinical care. If IT in the health service is going to regain the confidence of the medical profession then more emphasis has to be placed by the DH on making sure that the new systems accurately capture the dialogue between doctor and patient. Everything else flows from getting that right.
- The Health Informatics Unit (HIU) was established in 2002 and is housed within the Clinical Standards Department of the Royal College of Physicians in London.The main aims of the HIU are: to develop standards for recording and communicating information about patients; to apply these standards to operational records to improve the validity and utility of patient data; and to structure the records so that the information can be incorporated into electronic records, shared with other healthcare providers and analysed with confidence.
- Find out more in the Clinical Standards section of the RCP website.