- Paul Airoh MD talked to Tom Gatten
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You can book to go to Malaga tomorrow on LastMinute.com. Want to see Beyonce? TicketMaster can give you exactly the seat you want. But break your hip and there’s no hospital booking system. You’ll wait six hours in a dingy corridor while a receptionist phones every ward sister in the Care Trust to ask them for a bed. Why? It’s so ironic: developers are the problem solvers of the modern world, but if they get sick they’re at the mercy of last century’s IT.
A lot of doctors get frustrated by the lack of change in the NHS. Some leave after two years, go somewhere they can hope to see some progress. The old ones just hang on to their pensions and keep their heads down in meetings: they’ve learnt to shut up.
But now is the right time for people like us to change things, because the government is open to private sector solutions. A lot of young doctors like me use smartphones, iPads and social media in free time; but during working hours we’re mired in mountains of paper bureaucracy, inefficient administration and prehistoric technology like bleepers and switchboards.
Take bleepers for example. When I’m at a patient’s bedside and my bleeper goes, I have no idea if I’m being called away for a gunshot wound or a sore throat. These things aren’t even like pagers, there’s no text, just a phone number. So I have to find a landline and call an administrator to find out why I’m needed. We need something like SpinVox that transcribes messages so we can prioritise.
Or take incident data, everything that happens in a hospital – MRSA outbreaks, food poisoning, bed shortages, nurses or doctors missing from wards – should be logged in the incident books. But often they’re not because it involves finding the right forms (paper forms remember), filling out every last detail, finding an envelope, sending it to the right person… things get missed all the time. I get so sick every time I walk past a fire hose in a corridor that’s disconnected. It’s there for a reason! But who can I report it to? Will it ever be fixed? There should be an iPhone app for reporting any incident, anywhere in the hospital. Computers could deal with this data in a coherent way.
The NHS wastes billions on closed-source, dead-end IT systems that are obsolete by the time they arrive, or are sometimes cancelled. It wastes millions on Microsoft licences for every PC in every hospital in the country, when Google Docs are free. If NHS IT has a problem, they go to Microsoft. But Microsoft never works with practicing British doctors on the solution. It’s always the top-down approach.
The NHS is at least ten years behind the rest of the corporate world in IT. It’s laughable. And please don’t talk to me about ‘NHS Innovations’ – the department that supposedly promotes inventions from inside the NHS – they move just as slowly as the rest of the health service, they only accept suggestions from inside the NHS and they take your intellectual property. Their website recently featured a proud therapist who had invented a spring-loaded page-turner for disabled people. In the US they have the iPad. Case closed.
We need an alternative pathway to bring innovation into medicine, because the NHS will never heal itself.
The answer to all this is pretty clear. We need to bring together practising doctors, developers and startup companies. It’s critical to have user feedback, i.e. working doctors must be involved with the development, but that’s easy in a startup. It’s a triple win situation – private industry is promoted by solving public sector waste, and we can sell these British healthcare solutions abroad. The NHS is a great opportunity too, because it’s the largest unified health system anywhere – enlightened small enterprises could actually bring money into the UK by solving problems here first.