Doctors complain of IT ‘in the stone age’

The United Kingdom’s NHS — the world’s largest public health service — is working on creaking IT infrastructure. In any sector, that’s a ticking time bomb. But when you consider that the NHS holds medical records for nearly 67 million people, a breach of that system could become a meltdown. This article from the Financial Times (paywalled) is ringing the alarm bells from the perspective of doctors.

“I am at a top London hospital and yet at times I feel as though we are operating in the stone age,” one doctor told the FT. For example, doctors email lists of patients to themselves to print out elsewhere. Some 13.5 million working hours estimated to be lost annually due to inadequate IT systems.

On the NHS side, it may sound like things are broken, but on the tech side, there are probably a lot of biz-dev folks rubbing their hands together. The NHS itself works with a long list of suppliers and also began a relationship with Google’s DeepMind almost a decade ago. All of that is only going to see more activity: dozens of companies are building AI-enabled “scribes” to help doctors and other clinicians handle extensive admin work; AI is also being applied to drug discovery.

Yes, this FT article is based on subjective experience, and on the surface you might think IT complaints don’t feel monumental. But present the same information to malicious hackers and you don’t know how it might get used. We just hope the next news cycle won’t be about a gigantic data breach.