In the UK health care is national and popular, but its health IT is a mess
LIVERPOOL, England — Diabetics and gammy knees, old men and women with failing hearts and smoke-damaged lungs, cancer patients and sick kids. Sandra Oelbaum sees them every day, as she has for 30 years as a general practitioner, or GP, on the outskirts of this once-bustling port. One thing these high-need patients have in common: The array of doctors caring for them generally can't share information in a timely way.
that’s been elusive in the United States, even 10 years after Washington plowed tens of billions of dollars into bringing health care fully online. “As primitive as our health IT system is in the United States, my impression was they are pretty far behind us,” said Terry Fairbanks, founder of the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare at MedStar Health in Washington, D.C. He was on a 2016 blue-ribbon panel that reviewed information technology in the NHS.
“We have a health system that despite it being nationalized and you’d assume from the outside completely integrated, from the inside you can see it’s still a lot of IT elements strung together,” said NHS England CEO Simon Stevens at a briefing with U.S. reporters earlier this year. “The initial purpose of [electronic health records] in the U.K. was to have a robust, consistent legible record that could follow the patient around, and in the main it is quite impressive,” said Sally Lewis, who leads a large GP practice in Wales.
Stevens, who took over NHS England in 2014 after 10 years as a senior executive at UnitedHealth Group in the United States, has decentralized EHR purchasing decisions while starting a series of other initiatives, sometimes with U.S. help.
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