Cloud2 Director Simon Hudson takes a look into the future and asks what roles ICT will be playing in the NHS over the next year.

What happened to the cloud? Last year there was much talk about cloud computing and NHS, with some providers being very bullish… not us. We continue to advise that there are major hurdles to adoption. Without doubt the biggest is the Data Protection Act and the national policy on storage of patient data. It’s simple really: you can’t let PID go outside England. So no Amazon EC3, no Office 365, no Salesforce.com or Google; at least not if there is patient data involved. It’s actually illegal and responsible directors could go to jail (in theory).Until this is addressed via a policy change or a decent English cloud offering then the benefits will be denied to the NHS

Meanwhile the NHS, as Stephen Dorrill MP observes, is going through a period of unprecedented change. This is manifested in terms of supremely challenging efficiency improvements and yet another round of reorganisation. With PCT clusters forming as precursors to whatever comes next (CCGs or some other TLA) and SHAs nominally evaporating, it is vital that organisational knowledge and records are retained. SharePoint can easily address this and we see trusts and clusters taking the same line as South West London in creating an intranet platform to act as their repository of organisational knowledge. That same platform also addresses the efficiency need and we anticipate greater uptake of eForms and workflow as a strong contributor to delivering the 4% year on year improvement the economic climate demands.

In parallel the National Programme for IT may not be actually dead, but it in palliative care and the prognosis is poor. An upshot of this is the new freedoms for trusts around clinical system procurement, with the market having become more open than for almost a decade. Some trusts may opt for a full, high investment, big bang EPR, while others will look to integrating existing and new, smaller systems in order to manage risk and spend while delivering near-term, cumulative improvements. I parallel we expect a strong push towards digitisation of records and a careful move towards clinical portals. We hope this will also let trusts use their SharePoint investments for interim and mezzanine clinical applications, such as our own Clinical Repository, InfoPath based eForms and as the basis for the clinical portals.

And finally, collaboration across organisations continues to grow. In 2011 the majority of rich intranet implementations included an embedded extranet, often partnered with our SEA external access technology (that provides user authentication and management without corrupting their AD). In 2012 we see this becoming a core driver for many projects; joined up, integrated healthcare requires joined up communications, data and processes.

As trusts realise the magnitude of the efficiencies needed the smart ones will take advantage of the £100k – £500k value they have in existing user licenses to deliver efficiencies, to push their increased workloads into SharePoint, to replace expensive point solutions and standalone technologies with newer, better solutions built on a common enterprise platform.

Simon Hudson is the co-director of Cloud2.

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