The Government have released a state of digital government review, which revealed that despite the UK public sector spending £26 billion (£8 billion in the NHS) on digital resources, the NHS remains severely under-digitised. It found that 45% of NHS services still lack a digital pathway.
According to the review, this lack of digitisation causes three main problems: duplication, causing inefficiency; fragmentation of data; and missed opportunities to create more successful policy outcomes.
It accuses the public sector of not realising the value of its buying power. The public sector does not have a cohesive digital sourcing strategy: organisational silos, the challenges of sharing services, and the lack of collective buying drive fragmented purchasing. It calls out the NHS, for example, where each of the NHS’s 209 secondary care entities negotiates and buys its own infrastructure.
Staggeringly, NHS England was found to spend as much as 70-85% of its technology budgets on upkeep instead of modernisation or innovation, hindering its ability to pivot to being a more efficient, patient-friendly service.
The report concludes that the benefits of improved digitisation on services, where they have been implemented, are manifold across sectors. Virtual wards are illustrative of this success. Cambridge NHS Trust introduced virtual wards to treat patients in their homes, and currently save over 1,000 bed days of hospital capacity each month.
