A NEW DAWN FOR DIGITAL?
The last few years have seen great leaps forward for pharmacy in the UK, with developments such as community service provision and the rollout of vaccinations for COVID reinforcing how pharmacists are at the heart of a modern health service. By Dr Dan Corbett.
K
ey elements of how pharmacists do their job are currently far from modern. The emergence of digital healthcare
strategies for the future are set to change this.
Digital systems are increasingly transforming our lives, allowing us to communicate with people across the globe, monitor a range of systems in our home, access endless knowledge, and record and interpret data about our own health in ways previously only possible via the use of complex clinical equipment. However, there is still frustration amongst healthcare providers and patients, as being able to access health records digitally and act upon them, still seems to be many lightyears away.
However, the trajectory for change is improving. Home nations within the UK have been working to develop their own digital healthcare strategies, which seek to bring about a paradigm shift in how digital is used in healthcare. These strategies seek to develop fully interconnected systems and services across all aspects of healthcare, allowing for the right people to get the right data at the right time, so that the right decisions can be taken, and so that patients are informed in the right way, resulting in healthier lives.
The Shape of Things to Come The digital healthcare strategies provide an overall vision for how healthcare will look in the digital age. As part of this vision, strategies set out clear mission statements, tagged to key outcomes. The themes within these outcomes centre on: • Providing patients with greater access to and control over their own data and health journeys,
• The development of effectively interconnected systems which allow healthcare professionals
to share and collaborate on patient care more effectively, and
• The effective use of resultant massive data sets to introduce large-scale efficiencies and improvements into what health services do.1,2
Should we be able to achieve them, these outcomes will undoubtedly improve the health of patients, and improve how we work both separately and as multidisciplinary teams, whilst also building considerable levels of much - needed resilience into our respective branches of the NHS.
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