According to U.K. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, the U.K. has the potential to become a "global hub of health technology."
His pronouncement comes after the failure of the NHS initiative known as the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), which aimed to create electronic medical records (EMRs) for every British citizen. The project originally was budgeted to cost 2.3 billion pounds ($3.5 billion) over three years, but the costs swelled to over 12.4 billion pounds ($19.1 million).
The NHS responded by scrapping the program in favor of a locally controlled approach. Hunt expects all health records held by a person's general practitioner to be available online by 2015. He also expects EMRs including both health and social care to be available online by 2018.
Hunt said that the U.K. would provide access to doctors' survival rates across 10 different specialties so that patients could make more informed choices about care.
"It's going to save thousands of lives, and it’s going to drive up our clinical standards to the very best in the world, where they aren’t already," Hunt said.
Secretary Hunt may have an exaggerated view of the U.K.'s healthcare greatness. The World Health Organization (WHO) ranked the U.K.'s healthcare system 18th in the world in its 2010 World Health Report.
Still, Hunt compares the U.K. to Silicon Valley as a potential birthplace for healthcare IT greatness.
"Just as a few things came together that led to the birth of the internet and the whole Silicon Valley explosion, we are actively trying to create a series of contributions in the U.K. that mean that we are the global hub of health technology," Hunt said.
Hunt admitted that NPfIT was a failure, calling it "a huge disaster." Still, he says that the NHS can't fail to explore technology because of that failure.
"I think of my jobs as health secretary is to say, look, we must learn from that and move on but we must not be scared of technology as a result."
Edited by
Alisen Downey
