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The national health service in England has spent billions rolling out electronic patient records and yet large numbers of frontline staff are unable to use them effectively, according to think-tank research.
A small number of NHS organisations are struggling to use EPRs at all and “many more aren’t yet using these systems to their full potential”, the Health Foundation said in a report on Wednesday.
Health secretary Wes Streeting has made transitioning the NHS from “analogue to digital” one of the three “big shifts” the service must undergo in how it delivers care.
“The biggest opportunities for improving NHS productivity over the next few years will probably come from getting more out of tech that is already in the system,” said Malte Gerhold, director of innovation and improvement at the Health Foundation.
“EPRs are one of the NHS’s biggest recent investments in technology,” said Gerhold, calling for the government and health leaders to set out a new strategy “to get EPRs working properly”.
The report, shared with the Financial Times, found that a lack of training and funding to teach staff on how to use these systems had been a key challenge.
Since the early 2000s, successive governments have encouraged the rollout of electronic health records with the aim of making patient information more accessible to different parts of the NHS.
However, the FT has previously reported on the lack of interoperability between different patient record systems used in hospitals, as well as lab result systems within hospitals themselves, which has led to blood samples being mislabelled, or patients being misidentified.
While 90 per cent of trusts have these systems in place, the report found “scepticism” among both industry and healthcare professionals as to the benefits currently being gained from electronic patient records.
“Many feel that EPRs have, for the most part, been poorly implemented or are being used only for their most basic functionalities,” the report found.
The funding of EPRs is fragmented, with individual trusts procuring their own systems and pots of funding allocated for use on such services by the government every few years.
In the 2024 spring Budget, the previous Conservative government pledged to spend £2bn on NHS IT systems, including EPRs. Individual trusts have in some cases spent hundreds of millions of pounds on EPR systems.
But procuring and installing these systems is “merely” a starting point for trusts to “reap” the benefits that can come through the use of digital records, the Health Foundation concluded. It added that trusts should be asked to develop their own plans to sit alongside a national strategy.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “This report reveals the scale of the challenge we inherited and how far there is to go in modernising the health service.”
“Our plan for change will see our analogue NHS brought into the digital age, investing in the equipment and technology needed to boost productivity.”
