NHS Long Term Plan published, with focus on mainstreaming digitally enabled care

The long-anticipated NHS Long Term Plan, covering the next 10 years, was published today. The six chapters include measures to prevent 150,000 heart attacks, strokes and dementia cases, better access to mental health services for adults and children, and mainstreaming digitally-enabled care.

Practical priorities to drive NHS digital transformation fall under the digital chapter:

• Create straightforward digital access to NHS services, and help patients and their carers manage their health.
• Ensure that clinicians can access and interact with patient records and care
  plans wherever they are.
• Use decision support and artificial intelligence (AI) to help clinicians in applying best practice, eliminate unwarranted variation across the whole pathway of care, and support patients in managing their health and condition.
• Use predictive techniques to support local health systems to plan care for populations.
• Use intuitive tools to capture data as a by-product of care in ways that empower clinicians and reduce the administrative burden.
• Protect patients’ privacy and give them control over their medical record.
• Link clinical, genomic and other data to support the development of new treatments to improve the NHS, making data captured for care available for clinical research, and publish, as open data, aggregate metrics about NHS performance and services.
• Ensure NHS systems and NHS data are secure through implementation of security, monitoring systems and staff education.
• Mandate and rigorously enforce technology standards (as described in The Future of Healthcare) to ensure data is interoperable and accessible.
• Encourage a world leading health IT industry in England with a supportive environment for software developers and innovators.

The NHS Long Term was originally published at www.longtermplan.nhs.uk, where you can read the whole document.