11/07/2008

The NHS has published its Health Informatics Review which seeks to address information issues in the system.

Proposals in the review include a MySpace-style page for staff to access information, clinical dashboards so clinicians can monitor a service's performance and better overall information sharing.

A more detailed, technically-minded Health Informatics Review Implementation Report will follow in autumn, which will aim to show how the proposals can be put into practice.

Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS medical director and interim director general for informatics, admitted the NHS has been slow to provide sophisticated IT for its staff.

He said: 'There is a strong appetite in the NHS to develop a coherent informatics infrastructure to address the issues of data transfer and security between multiple organisations using a myriad of different systems in Europe's largest organisation, but this is not going to be easy.'

He added it would take time to get right but was 'fundamental to modern healthcare'.

The review also revealed that strategic health authorities will be permitted to contract IT companies to create temporary systems for the summary care record programme while the national system is being created.