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Professor Harry Hemingway, Director of The Farr Institute’s London Centre and Director of the UCL Institute of Health Informatics joined fellow clinicians, policymakers and healthcare IT experts at a recent Guardian roundtable to address the question, “Can technology save the NHS?”

The NHS has to make £22bn of efficiency savings by 2020 and intelligent use of IT is key in making that happen.

There was agreement that substantial benefits could come from the collection and analysis of data. Professor Harry Hemingway, said:

“Data clearly saves lives. The reason people survive from heart attack better year on year in this country is because we have got national quality and outcome registries. Clinicians in one hospital can compare their performance with that of another hospital. That’s very, very powerful and it’s very precious in the NHS.”

He added that the NHS’s status as a national organisation gave it a huge advantage when it came to being able to collect data: “It’s not possible to do that in the US or Sweden or Denmark.”

Read the full article at www.theguardian.com

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