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- Smart Healthcare, Wednesday 28 October 2009 09.00 GMT
Looking good: healthcare is overdue for more computerisation. Photo: jiunlimited.com
Health is the one bright spot in an otherwise flat outlook for public sector ICT spending, according to a recent overview presented by Kable's market analysts.
The public sector IT specialist, which also publishes SmartHealthcare.com, predicts that health spending will rise from £2.6bn in 2008-09 to £3.49bn in 2013-14, a rise of 34% over the five year period. Over that time, education ICT budgets will rise by 12%, local government will increase its spending by just 7% and defence and security ICT by 2%.
Meanwhile, criminal justice spending will drop by 3% and transport by 4%. Most strikingly, the ICT budgets of central government departments are predicted to drop by 15%, from £4.17bn to £3.54bn, and Whitehall will go from being worth £1.5bn a year more than health to near parity.
The UK is on the cusp of the big surge in healthcare IT spending. Kable reckons the market will expand by about 8% in both the current and the next financial years, with annual growth of approximately 4% in the three years after that, then go into a small decline of 2% in 2014-15.
Victor Almeida, Kable's senior health analyst, has written separately about why he believes health is government ICT's growth story. Part of it is down to familiar pressures for more healthcare, such as an ageing population with more long term health problems. But similar pressures apply to other parts of the state sector, and they are not looking at runaway growth.
Stephen Roberts, principal analyst at Kable, says that health is unusual for a number of reasons. Firstly, it starts from a particularly low base in its use of ICT, having been poor at handling information and working efficiently compared with other parts of the state and private sectors.
"It has further to go in doing things properly, largely because it's been dominated by professionals in ways that other organisations aren't," Roberts says, adding that managers in other parts of the state, such as local government, have had considerably more latitude to use ICT in changing work patterns. Highly skilled medical professionals are resistant to such changes, but the need to make big alterations to NHS practices is now irresistible.
Roberts also believes that the national groundwork for a major programme in NHS IT has largely been completed, through successful projects including the N3 broadband network, the NHSmail email system, the Patient Demographics Service and work on standards for sharing data. This national work means that major local projects can now move forward.
"There is no longer a need for things to be done centrally," he says. "Spending on NHS IT will not depend on decisions made in Whitehall any more. The things that need to be done nationally have been done nationally."
Taking the high road
While Kable's expectations of growth are based mainly on England, they are backed by developments north of the border. Healthcare was fully devolved to the UK's four home nations a decade ago, and Scotland has been steaming ahead on ICT. It has national emergency care records in place, and is developing work on areas including information security – even if in reaction to a well publicised breach of patient records – and telecare. Without the political baggage of the National Programme, and the nimbleness caused by serving a population one tenth of the size of England, Scotland has tended to move more quickly in the field.
Despite early hostile comments from leader David Cameron, the Conservatives are now indicating they will take a similar path if elected to government. Just last week shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley played up telecare's potential for keeping elderly people in their own homes and cited Scotland as a model.
There is also enthusiasm outside Britain for the increased use of ICT in healthcare, with countries including the US, France and Canada attempting to introduce electronic patient records, as SmartHealthcare.com has reported. In making up for a previous lack of investment, preparing for greatly increased demand and with the completion of preparatory work, healthcare ICT looks set to be the state sector growth story of the early 2010s.
Read Victor Almeida's predictions of why health ICT is set to grow.
