Jeremy Hunt said[1]:
“The NHS cannot be the last man standing as the rest of the economy embraces the technology revolution.”
It has trailed, except in General Practice, for decades, and the trailing part is that which has acquired control over the process and has for 2 decades been reeling back general practice. I suspect it actually can go on doing that.
“It is crazy that paramedics cannot access a full medical history of someone they are picking up in an emergency ”
It would be more crazy for them to sit there reading the full medical history, probably as pictures of letters and big Word for Windows files, while the patient bled out or expired from heart failure.
(A function mandated in all healthcare computer systems to answer the question =EmergencyMedicalSummary(PatId) might be more useful.)
“– and that GPs and hospitals still struggle to share digital records. ”
Actually, they don’t.
On the few occasions when the local hospital has wanted to share something it has had not difficulty and neither have I. More commonly though the hospitals want to avoid sharing, and if they want anything they want to ensure that people copy type from one computer system into the one they control, not share. Struggling implies the problems are technical and they are not technical.
[1] http://www.dh.gov.uk/health/2013/01/paperless/
(Which has something odd that allows a view of the page to appear, and then blanks it while sending messages to another web-server. Irritating. It also breaks the back arrow model of web navigation, which as everyone knows is the key function there. Not a good sign.