WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS
particularly for those we may term the ‘worried well’, or those yet to be diagnosed.
“But there is still some question about how much these methods actually save the health service, in total. There’s a mixed bag of research findings in this area.
“But the ‘first port of call’ being through digital devices is likely to become a lot more common. We’re going to see a lot more multi-channel contact, so not just the telephone call; we’ve already moved to the public using conventional websites, and we will soon see those interfaces being deliv- ered through portable devices like smart- phones. There’s definitely going to be more of that.”
Cutting out the admin
Ford continued: “We’ll also see these tech- nologies being used a lot more to support the delivery of more traditional healthcare services; for example, making sure people are reminded to come to hospital appoint- ments or enabling remote booking of hos- pital or GP appointments. That’s going to be common practice very soon.
“But on the remote monitoring side, which is perhaps slightly more invasive, the jury is out about how widespread that will be. There are certain classes of patients who are fairly ill for whom this is a boon and a massive reassurance; people with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), for example, who may be considerably house-bound.
“It helps the practitioners looking after them and the more general population, as well as people with, for example, Type 2 diabetes; there are a lot of potential bene- fits that could be delivered by helping them to live healthier lives and to monitor their wellbeing more accurately.
“Because most of the work being done relates to the most severe patients in se- lected groups, I think we know where we stand with that. But what is interesting is
trying to deliver the same health benefits to a much larger group of less severely ill people who are in the early symptomatic phases and have the potential to become much worse. That puts you in the area of health improvement, and how the NHS can support people to reduce their likelihood of becoming extremely ill. I think there is still a lot to be done there.”
Technologies that directly aid health pro- fessionals, for example devices that make them more mobile, connect up different systems or enable easier contact with other people in the NHS, are the other major form of wireless healthcare and are having their own measurable impacts on produc- tivity and efficiency.
Ford told us: “In many ways these pro- vide practitioners with ‘extensions’ to the healthcare systems they might already use in a hospital or general practice setting.
“I have to say that NHS Wales, like most parts of the NHS I work with, has been fo- cused up until relatively recently on more conventional types of healthcare, like com- puting, systems to support clinical practi- tioners, access, integration of primary care data systems, calls for emergency and out- of-hours.
“There is now, though, a lot of work going on around inter-operability, data stand- ards and connectivity, and more recently we have been looking much more at us- ing mobiles. We’ve currently got a lot of projects underway looking at iPhones and other ‘smart’ devices, and making them se- cure for use in hospitals through specialist settings.
“We’re trying to create safe approaches for these to be used, so that individual hospi- tals and healthcare organisations can have the confidence that if they are used prop- erly, they won’t present problems in terms of security or patient confidentiality. We now think we are close to achieving that, so
38 | national health executive May/Jun 11
that’s quite exciting, and opens up a whole new potential way of delivering useful ap- plications, particularly for the medical staff who are the most enthusiastic about it. They often already have smartphones or similar devices, and want to use them to help support their care practices. Up un- til relatively recently that has been more or less prohibited within hospitals. We’re trying to undo that block and get a bit of innovation.”
Safety first
Ford is optimistic, but also realistic, about the likely pace of change. He said: “It is quite hard. NHS Wales, and I’m sure the wider NHS too, is very keen to ensure that everything it does is best possible practice with regards to security and confidential- ity. It has taken a lot of time and effort to ensure that the solutions being produced don’t threaten this at all, or produce any additional risks.
“The use of mobile technologies must re- ally be done in the same vein, so it is about being as thorough as possible and checking left, right and centre to ensure there aren’t any possible new risks when introducing new technology, when perhaps risks didn’t exist before. Of course, in the past even with simple paper records and people’s notepads there were considerable risks with patient confidentiality.
“We tend to ignore that fact, and that actually sometimes the introduction of digital tech- nology makes things considerably better than they were be- fore – but they do also sometimes uninten- tionally produce new risks so we have to be cautious about that.”
David Ford FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit www.healthinformaticsresearchlabs.
swansea.ac.uk
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