Electronic Document Management – A Paperless Cure For The NHS?

Last year health secretary Jeremy Hunt gave the NHS the challenge of becoming paperless by 2018. Can the health service meet that deadline? Or will the NHS just end up with less paper than it did in 2013?

Mark Austin, CIO of Bedford Hospital, is in no doubt about whether the NHS can hit the paperless target.  “No,” he told Computer Weekly last year. “I think going paperless by 2018 is a good aspiration, but totally paperless is just too big an ask.”

Meanwhile Professor Mike Pearson at Aintree University Hospital said that a paperless NHS is achievable only “with enough will and drive,” and that it is unlikely to happen.  “There will be odd examples of it achieved well, but the NHS doesn’t have the organisation to achieve that at the moment,” he said.  Pearson added that it all comes down to politics, and local versus central decisions...