Why is the NHS a Web-Free Zone?

photo by Jude

Guest post from Roger Marlow, Health2Works

Before I try and answer that question, let’s start with a few questions about you. Do you use IT at work, and if so is it any good? And next, do you use the web at home, and how does that compare with your experience at work? If like me you find what is available 24 hours a day, for free, on the web utterly amazing and what is available in the typical work place relatively stone age, then you are not alone.

The incredible story of the growth of the web isn’t news anymore but even the raw numbers are still staggering. You can search 2 billion web pages in a fraction of a second, read 3 million wikipedia articles, watch 9 million YouTube videos, subscribe to 175,000 new blogs every day and chat with 200 million people on Facebook. And it's not just the scale of these facilities that is amazing. They are available all day every day, never run out of space, they continually add new features, and there are literally thousands of new things to try out every day. And it all happens without any overarching management or grand-design; the web has no CIO, no mission statement and no management team. 

Compare that with the experience of IT in a typical NHS PCT or Trust. Here we have CIOs, mission statements, and management and project teams galore, but there isn’t the feeling of innovation, pace and sheer wonder that you get from the web. Why is that? Perhaps you feel like Blackadder trying to teach arithmetic to Baldrick, who gives up complaining “To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people, wasn't it?”. Is the web just something that happens outside of healthcare?

Isn’t it time we put the web to work in the NHS? It has changed, largely for the better, key aspects of just about every other aspect of society. Perhaps it’s time to stop thinking that IT is something that happens ‘over there’, at huge expense and risk, by people with funny job titles, focused entirely on extremely complicated clinical integration projects. And what’s more we are at a crucial point in time. The web itself is going through a renaissance, creating so called Web2.0, supporting new social effects such as social networking, empowering the “long tail” and giving a global voice and power to even the smallest of minority groups. Which is all rather prescient for health. The NHS faces enormous increases in demand for more consumer friendly healthcare services and experiences at the same time as significant financial challenges. It can aid its own survival by taking advantage of some amazing technology.

Yes, the NHS has dabbled a bit with Web2.0 applications, but now is the time to embrace the full potential of Web2.0 and experiment like crazy. I and others are proposing ways of bringing, quickly and at low cost and risk, the amazing technology of the web, and in particular Web2.0, to healthcare. This is not just to give us all a better experience of IT in the workplace, but primarily to give better, more efficient care, to reach and connect with more people. 

Now is the time to act. Do you think the NHS is sufficiently curious? If you are interested in getting involved, please have a look at what Steve, Robin and I are up to at health2works and let me know what you think. 

Roger

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