WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS
NHE speaks to David Ford, director of the Health Informatics Research Laboratories at Swansea University, about convincing the NHS on wireless healthcare technology.
W
ireless healthcare is a broad church, covering both technologies with
which the patient directly interacts, and those focused instead on making the jobs of health professionals themselves more effi cient.
But there are similar barriers to the adop- tion of both when it comes to overcoming initial reluctance and doubt, altering tra- ditional ways of ‘doing’ healthcare, dealing with concerns over privacy and digital se- curity, and ensuring compatibility across a trust and the wider NHS.
David Ford is the director of the Health In- formatics Research Laboratories (HIRL) at Swansea University, and the joint lead of the Health Information Research Unit for Wales (HIRU).
HIRL is a collaboration between Swansea’s own Centre for Health Information, Re- search & Evaluation and Wales’ national IT programme, called NHS Wales Informatics Service (formerly ‘informing Healthcare’), aimed at providing facilities to “design, prototype, test and evaluate” emerging health technologies.
NHE asked Ford how far away we are from a major tipping point in wireless healthcare – and about the impediments that have been encountered so far.
He said: “I think the biggest impact of wireless communications in healthcare is
36 | national health executive May/Jun 11
just around the corner; I certainly don’t see wireless technology now as having the impact that it has the potential to provide. There are a number of reasons for that, but there is a long way to go for it to deliver on its full promise.”
Barriers to progress
“You might argue that there are differ- ent impediments to progress in different areas,” Ford argues, “but it’s not about the technology any more. There are is- sues about connectivity in certain parts of the country, yes, and when you’re talking
about mobile phone networks there are still blackspots, but they are not huge and not really an issue any more. There aren’t problems about delivering Wi-Fi around hospitals any more and while it is expen- sive, it’s not an extraordinary cost. Most of the end-use gizmos, in one shape or another, are pretty well track-tested and capable of delivering the benefi ts that the NHS needs.
“So I don’t think it’s really about the in- frastructure or the technology providers. I think it’s about the way the NHS wishes to use the technology – and perhaps there
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