That was the year that was: a review of 2007

Richard Aspin, Microsoft Sales Manager for Healthcare, looks back on healthcare, IT and the activities of the Microsoft UK healthcare team in 2007. He reflects that the year would be remembered very differently if there hadn’t been a late incident in Newcastle...

This review of the year would have been very different if it had been written before “HMRC”. Once we knew that HM Revenue and Customs had lost the details of every child benefit recipient in the country in the post, security was suddenly the issue of 2007.

Security has always been an issue in the NHS; we know it is the term most frequently searched by users of this website. But the HMRC incident has cemented in people’s minds just how wrong things can go very, very quickly if you don’t pay close attention to both technology and business processes.

Identity matters

There was also an individual aspect to the HMRC incident. It really brought home the idea that an individual’s identity has a value. Who people give their personal information to, and how they manage it, is becoming very important. “Once we knew that HM Revenue and Customs had lost the details of every child benefit recipient in the country in the post, security was suddenly the issue of 2007.”

People will increasingly expect a dialogue with private and public bodies about how their identities are handled - and that will pose some challenges for the NHS, given the sensitivity of medical information.

Many NHS staff will have been personally affected by the HMRC incident, so they may be very engaged around corporate messages about security and data handling. Meanwhile, the first big event of 2007 for Microsoft was the launch of Vista and Office 2007 both of which can help with security.

Vista, for example, makes it much easier to encrypt information, so that even if laptops are stolen or discs go astray the data on them cannot be read easily. So while we would never claim that technology is a complete solution, we certainly have technology that can help.

Change at the top

If HMRC had never happened, the big events to reflect on in 2007 would probably have been people changes. We had a change of Prime Minister, from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown, and subsequent changes at the Department of Health.

We had a new health secretary, Alan Johnson, a new minister to conduct a review of the NHS, Lord Ara Darzi, and a new minister for healthcare IT, Ben Bradshaw. At the same time, there were changes at NHS Connecting for Health, with the planned transition of Richard Granger and the development of the national local ownership programme.

Yet there has also been a great deal of continuity in 2007. The general course of healthcare policy is clear, and as a result of the comprehensive spending review, we know what money will be available to deliver it. Despite the criticism it has faced, the National Programme for IT in the NHS has also set a course and built up a momentum that we hope will be sustained.

The next big event of the year for Microsoft’s UK healthcare team has to be seen in this context. This was the signing of the new Enterprise Agreement with the NHS. This attracted a lot of press attention, but we were coming to the end of the three year period covered by the initial agreement and working within a nine year framework.

So while Richard Granger and his team drove us hard to make sure that the new EA reflected the changed requirements of the NHS, there was little doubt that a new agreement would be signed.

The EA and helping trusts with business issues

Microsoft’s commitment to the Common User Interface programme continues and this programme is starting to attract world-wide attention. “There is still a tendency for people in the health service to sometimes feel beleaguered and our challenge should be to listen to and support them wherever possible.”
It will put a new focus on infrastructure improvement, driven by NHS CFH’s national infrastructure maturity model (NIMM), which we are supporting, and our own infrastructure optimisation tool for the NHS.

However, when we sit down with people in NHS trusts, they are not interested in the EA per se; they are interested in what is in it and how it can help them with their business issues. We have seen a lot of interest this year in unified communications and on how they can help people to communicate and collaborate to make better decisions for patients.

But the thing that is absolutely top of people’s lists is Business Intelligence; absolutely everybody in every trust that we go into wants a better idea of what is going on in their organisations, whether that is to meet the 18 week waiting time target, to help with costings or to tackle other policy priorities, such as reducing healthcare associated infections.

We expect to see even more interest in BI next year. Yes, there is a review of the NHS underway, but it’s very unlikely that it will scrap something like the 18 week target or the new payment regimes.

Even if the target was relaxed to 20 weeks, or taken down to 10 weeks, the issues facing trusts in terms of gathering data and making their processes more efficient would be the same – and we believe we have good technologies to support them.

Into the New Year

So, is healthcare IT in good shape as we finish the year? I think it is. That is because I am an eternal optimist, but it is also because the team and I engage all the time with very smart people in the service who are determined to drive services forward.

HMRC has been a real jolt on security. There is frustration that while reviews take place, change is not happening – or not happening fast enough - on the ground. There is still a tendency for people in the health service to sometimes feel beleaguered and our challenge should be to listen to and support them wherever possible.

Yet I see more and more examples of people doing good things with our technology – and that delivered by other vendors. The challenge is to get those good things happening faster and in more places. Roll on 2008.