The United Kingdom is made out of 4 sub countries as you all know: Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England. What is really flabbergasting is the fact that each country has its own national health system and even though interoperability exists there are some differences in terms of organisation but also in terms of vision.

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Will the Highlander register in Scotland or in England?

 

Let’s talk about what really interests us namely On line medical follow up. England is by far the leader among all 4 systems with various initiatives stemming from the NPfIT, the largest e healtrh project in Europe:
+ first the NHS CRS (Care records services) that allows GP to access patients data when the latter are consenting
+ the PACS (Picture Archiving Communications Systems) where at the end of 2006 83 million pictures were already stored
+ Electronic hospital bookings with a rythm of 10000 bookings a day
+ the EPS (electronis transmission of prescription) 16 million prtescriptions among the 370 million in England wentr through a dediacted electronic portal in 2006
+ The N3 (new national network), heralded as the largest VPN in Europe a very important component for the validity of a medical system.

Hence, we can point out a huge number of positive points, yet, England is not perfect and furthermore the UK. Today there are 12000 different systems available for 250000 NHS staff in England? Why that? Is it because the aforementionned systems are barely efficient or because medical system is the hot potato considering the huge investment driven by the English NHS?

One of the main problem we have noticed in many countries is the lack of focus on leading up an aggregator that makes sense from a legal and technical point of view. A lot of operators are trying to interpret the thinking of the NHS bigwigs yet nobody is able to promote the best solution. Another problem could stem from the lack of vertical integration in the software business. When thinking about an OS (operating System) we clearly see a link between the promoter of an equipment (such as a PC) and the software. Couldn’t this be done to a certain extent for medical devices?