Hunt offers £260m to help hospitals go digital

17 May 13
Hospitals are to share £260m of additional funding to speed up the move to electronic patient records and prescriptions, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced.

By Richard Johnstone | 17 May 2013

Hospitals are to share £260m of additional funding to speed up the move to electronic patient records and prescriptions, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced.

The cash will be used by hospitals to ensure doctors and nurses can access accurate details about the care of a patient, through the use of portable computers. This forms part of moves to digitise the health service by 2018. Hospitals will be able to bid for money from the fund later this year.

Hunt said the money would be used to create new electronic systems that link patient records across different hospital departments, ensuring that everyone involved in treatment plans had access to up-to-date information.

He highlighted one trust – St Helens and Knowsley – that has already put its patient records online for doctors and nurses. This could be replicated elsewhere, Hunt said.

The fund will also be used to develop electronic prescribing, so that computer-generated prescriptions can be sent by doctors directly to pharmacies, and linked to each patient by unique barcodes. This will also help reduce errors in prescribed medicines.

Announcing the funding, Hunt said: ‘In many places, right now, a paramedic picking up a frail elderly woman who has had a fall will not always know she has dementia, because he or she cannot access her notes. Or a doctor is prescribing the wrong drugs, because they don’t know what drugs their patient is already on.

‘If we are to improve patient safety then we must allow the NHS to have access to the best tools available and this fund will help them achieve that.’

In January, Hunt announced a plan for the NHS to become paperless by 2018, which he said could save billions of pounds a year while also improving services.

A commitment was also made in last November’s NHS Mandate that, by March 2015, patients will be able to access their GP record online, as well as book appointments with their GP and order repeat prescriptions.

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