Former health minister tells NHS to embrace technology
pharmafile | April 9, 2014 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | Jeremy Hunt, autism, brain in hand, google, paperless, telehealth
The Labour MP and former health minister Ben Bradshaw has urged the National Health Service to do more when it comes to adopting new technology.
The former health minister and MP for Exeter was visiting Brain in Hand, a company based at the University of Exeter’s Innovation Centre, as part of National Autism Awareness Month.
Bradshaw says: “Brain in Hand is a fantastic example of an organisation which is using technology to help individuals take control of their own support and care.
“We know the NHS faces a huge financial burden and that too many people can’t access the support they need, often because of overstretched local services, or high care thresholds.
“Technologies like Brain in Hand offer simple solutions that actually put the most important people – those with the condition – in charge of developing and managing their own support system. It’s personalisation of care through a supportive and collaborative, clinically-proven, approach.”
The Brain in Hand technology is a mobile cloud-based system, includes daily schedules, alerts and mentoring support which are designed to help people with autism to manage their lives and lower their anxiety levels.
The technology was highly commended at the National Autistic Society Awards in March.
According to Andrew Stamp, chief executive of Brain in Hand, mobile e-health solutions will “change how we think about care forever”.
Rapid growth in health and lifestyle mobile smartphone technology has seen the market grow from a global turnover of $100 million in 2010 to $4 billion in 2013, and is estimated to reach $26 billion by 2016.
Stamp says: “How we receive and consume healthcare is going to change forever. People want to get on with their lives and not be held back by the inefficiencies of the old way of doing things, restrained by standardised care from an overburdened system designed in the 1950s and stretched to the limit.
“The NHS could save hundreds of millions of pounds and help champion the emergence of a new and more personalised approach to healthcare, if it embraced a simple piece of kit that most of us already take for granted – the smartphone.
“What we’ve done at Brain in Hand is taken the best of clinical excellence, put it in the smartest technology, and tailored it to make it easy to use in the real world. It is a truly patient-centred model of care, equips people with tools to use on the go and connects patients to the medical community through the cloud.”
This call comes on the same day that researchers from the University of Newcastle announced positive stories from Parkinson’s patients who were using the wearable technology Google Glass to help with their daily lives.
Efficacy and adoption questions
But clinical trial data – as well as cost-effectiveness studies – are still lacking in this area, given the newness of the technology, and there are lingering questions over how just how effective this technology is in regards to improving outcomes at a reasonable cost.
The government however are still keen to push forward with digital innovation, and the health secretary Jeremy Hunt has previously announced he wants a ‘paperless’ NHS by 2016, with a major focus on digitising medical records.
Hunt also wants to see the roll-out of a nation-wife telehealth scheme that aims to benefit around 3 million people by 2017.
But in February the government launched a consultation to establish whether doctors in the UK are being held back from using innovative treatments, due to worries over being sued if something goes wrong.
The government is running the consultation as it wants to know if a proposed Medical Innovation Bill will encourage doctors to innovate in medical practice, while at the same time improving safeguards for patients.
The hope is that the Bill will clarify existing law: at present there is no Act of Parliament that puts into black and white how responsible medical innovation is defined, or what a test of clinical negligence should be.
Should this Bill be passed into law, the uptake and adoption of new technologies could increase, but until then the NHS will most likely remain cautious about adopting new technologies.
Ben Adams
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