As healthcare “is already now as digital as it can be”, NHSx and NHS-D (NHS Digital) are being wound down, with new departments for ongoing works created in NHS England & NHS Improvement with relevant staff moved across.
NHS E&I will now be responsible for approving any NHS I.T. projects valued at greater than £15m.
It always struck me as odd that they became two organisations in the first place.
One thing that gets me though is the “NHS England” focus. I know we are devolved nations - but when it comes to NHS data coordination / standards / privacy consent / security / policy on secondary use of data etc there needs to be some cross-border corrdination (if not alignmenment).
True, it’s possibly because healthcare has long been a devolved power, and the choice of the nations has been to develop on what each perceives as the different priorities.
How we continue to run 3 different national identifier systems (and if that’s cost efficient!) is a mystery though!
Wales officially adopted the NHS number as the national patient identified some time ago.
I think Scotland still use the CHI number?
I have worked on a few project in Wales and they do use the English NHS number. It’s only Scotland who is different, which causes issues when transferring patients across the border!!
To be fair Scotland adopted the CHI as its prime patient identifier (a 10 digit number that is unique with no cross over to English numbers) on 6 June 2006 (666, heh), Which is why we had a national PACS years before anyone else, amongst other benefits. Had we waited for England to get its act together… We want to rationlise our RIS codes in Scotland to better leverage data analysis, AI, etc, in our common archive, but currently have to tug our forelock to England, and then wait, to change anything. There are advantages to being able to do your own thing.
Ah it’s Northern Ireland for the 3rd.
It’s odd, all of us use similar numbering systems which have been planned to use the same format and not overlap, but we store them completely separately still…