Yet, healthcare providers continue to operate under tight budget constraints and limited personnel, without adequate resources to tackle the exploding cybercrime threat landscape. And as innovations develop at pace in the industry, from wearable health devices to telemedicine, IT managers are dealing with an ever-increasing number of endpoints.

From large healthcare systems to primary care practices, IT teams are often small, with one technician managing thousands of endpoints. Keeping track of so many endpoints across the network can pose challenges when it comes to patching, creating compliance and security problems. Adding to this, healthcare remains a highly distributed sector, with employees and IT assets often scattered across different estates, offices, and buildings.

Once attackers gain access to personal medical information, they can manipulate the data, cause operational disruption, and ultimately undermine public trust within an organisation. Thankfully, there are tools available for healthcare networks to reduce their attack surface and improve their ability to prevent, detect, and respond to cybercrime attacks.

Employees: the first line of defence 

The UK Cybersecurity breaches survey, published in April this year, recently revealed phishing as the most prevalent type of cybercrime in the UK. And, as AI and LLMs become widely adopted across organisations and more accessible, these attacks have become increasingly difficult to spot. With 88% of data breaches caused by human error, healthcare institutions must view their employees as the first line of defence against threat actors.

Comprehensive security awareness training and education is fundamental for healthcare professionals to identify phishing attacks in the first instance. Everyone – from clinicians to administrative staff to IT admins – must develop the skills to spot, avoid, and report common tactics used by threat actors. In training sessions, it can be useful to conduct phishing email simulations, so employees can gain real-life experience of what a suspicious email might look or sound like.

Training is a fundamental step towards building a culture of security and reducing healthcare cybercrime. Alongside increased employee education around phishing, IT teams can consider limiting user access to the absolute minimum. This reduces the negative impact of a bad actor, should they assume the identity of a legitimate user.

Back to Basics

Patching is a vital security tool for IT managers looking to safeguard sensitive patient information. Out-of-date operating systems and applications can leave doors open for intrusion or exploits. According to the Ponemon Institute, most data breaches (57%) can be directly attributed to attackers exploiting a known vulnerability that hadn’t been patched. To simplify system updates, healthcare institutions can consider patch management tools to automate numerous updates across all their machines. Processes such as patch auditing also make it easier to identify any failed or pending patches and continue monitoring for any incompatibility or performance issues to keep systems secure.

In the event of a successful attack, security and IT teams should also consider a robust backup system to prevent loss of cloud and endpoint data. This will ensure continued access to critical information, in the face of system compromise and ransomware attempts. By backing up their data and monitoring endpoint activity, healthcare institutions can better protect themselves and keep disruption to patient care to a minimum.

A solution like automated endpoint management gives IT teams all of this in one central source of truth, providing visibility over the full network in a single pane of glass, displaying maintenance and updates, security and backups, and most critically, a view of all endpoints which could pose a possible risk. This also allows IT teams to automate processes such as patching and endpoint hardening without having to manually access machines, in turn, simplifying operations and alleviating the pressures of limited access to skills, resources, and budget.

The road ahead for cybercrime in healthcare

Whilst necessary to improve the speed and availability of diagnosis and treatment, the increasing number of endpoints in healthcare can also open more attack vectors for those looking to compromise or abuse the systems assisting in care provision. The stakes remain incredibly high. Cyber incidents not only result in huge fines for the responsible parties but can also erode public trust in the sector and put people’s data, and even lives, at risk.

For healthcare IT teams, ensuring endpoint security, reducing instances of cybercrime, and creating frictionless patient-provider relationships are non-negotiable. But effectively managing shared endpoints spread across buildings and sites, while supporting providers and staff at scale with limited resources, is no mean feat.

IT managers can lean on solutions like automated endpoint management to free themselves from manual monitoring and threat response across thousands of endpoints. These systems make it possible to detect anomalies, implement fixes, and maintain security protocols automatically. They enable IT managers to focus on what matters most: empowering healthcare providers to provide exceptional care for their patients.

By Andre Schindler, GM EMEA and SVP Global Sales at NinjaOne

The post Why Healthcare Remains a Prime Target for Cybercrime and what IT Leaders can do about it appeared first on .

New ESMP platform accelerates move to single view of product information

Improving patient access to life-enhancing treatments is a central mission of companies ranging from the world’s largest biopharmas to early-stage biotechs. Each pursues its own path to get there. For some, the focus is responsibly-priced medicines. Others are amplifying patient voices during the medicine life cycle or using ESG bonds to reach underserved communities.

Patient access to life-enhancing treatments is a struggle without being able to ensure the timely delivery of medicines. Between 2000 and 2018, Europe experienced a 20-fold increase in drug shortages. On average, each pharmacy in the European Union spends more than six hours a week dealing with scarce supplies of medicines; in some countries, they spend as much as 20 hours per week.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has responded to the lack of a standardized EU-wide registry by launching the European Shortages Monitoring Platform (ESMP). In reality, the failure to meet patient demand for specific drugs is not limited to Europe. Healthcare systems worldwide are straining under rising costs. In the U.K., intermittent supplies are causing a medicine shortage crisis that risks harming patient outcomes as physicians ration medicines in short supply or switch to less effective alternatives.

Biopharmas have limited influence over many of the contributing factors obstructing patient access like transportation issues, physician availability, or healthcare funding. Although these may be out of companies’ scope of impact, what they can improve is how quickly they communicate and make decisions when managing supplies. Robust product definitions used consistently across functions, greater control of their data and documents, and an organization-wide understanding of regulatory approval status in each market would all help. Companies that centralize their product information will not only ensure regulators receive timely indicators of imminent shortages but also improve their own capacity for internal and external collaboration.

Earlier warning signs on critical shortages

Drug shortages have many complex and interdependent causes, ranging from biopharma sector consolidation and a limited number of suppliers to government pricing strategies and patent laws for innovative medicines. Such complexity makes it difficult for regulatory authorities to anticipate shortages, with few warning signs when stocks of critical medicines run low.

Having launched the ESMP in January 2025, EMA should soon be able to monitor drug supply, demand, and availability continuously. Marketing authorization holders (MAHs) are playing their part by providing product supply forecasts, availability, manufacturing details, and production plans to both national competent authorities (NCAs) and the ESMP[1].

To ensure that the product data currently held by EMA is accurate, biopharma sponsors will have to correct and enrich their authorized product datasets, either through direct data entry into the Product Management System UI (PMS) or by completing data loading templates with relevant information. As product data still sits across different functions (including clinical, regulatory, and pharmacovigilance), sponsors are getting ready to share information with ESMP by locating relevant data sources within their organizations — and, sometimes uncovering too late that their product information is inconsistent.

Sponsors need full transparency and control of their data to provide accurate sales and supply forecasts for critical medicines to ESMP. Data used to be copied and pasted as text when shared between departments; it should now be captured once at the source and then stored securely in the right format and place. In many instances, this means taking data out of documents and converting it into structured formats. As sponsors increasingly rely on outsourcing partners such as contract research organizations (CROs) and contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs), they need to connect seamlessly when exchanging information externally.

Single source of product information for regulators

In the past, major stockouts in key markets were more common than they should have been, partly because some biopharmas did not know which regulatory information management (RIM) systems held the correct dates for approval and supply. Some companies tried to compensate for the limited connectivity between regulatory, packaging, and logistics by preparing product supplies before receiving the regulatory go-ahead, which could mean an extra step of reworking labels and product packaging if only partial approvals were eventually obtained.

Recent regulatory developments are making a single source of product information a priority for sponsors. Modern RIM platforms can centralize registration data: including marketing status (and dates), product information, active substances, pack sizes, packaging details, and packaging medicinal product identifiers (PCID). Once companies license a product in a market (done by pack), its registration data will be recorded in RIM and become easier to share with ESMP. This can mitigate potential shortages. For instance, if a manufacturer has issues with a product, the regulator can see alternatives containing the same active pharmaceutical ingredient (API).

Post-approval manufacturing changes also lead to drug scarcity. Typically, a large biopharma may manage as many as 200 post-approval changes per product a year — or thousands across its global portfolio. Processing and preparing each change submission can take six months to two years for a company to complete because key systems (QMS, RIM, LIMS, ERP) and data are disconnected. Bringing together the systems underpinning quality and RIM would make it easier to identify which countries and internal documents are affected across multiple markets during a post-approval manufacturing change.

During a drug shortage event, manufacturing sites would not lose time trying to find which specification is registered in each market for each product. Because regulatory and quality teams would see the same product data and documents, quality change controls automatically trigger when a regulatory event occurs affecting multiple markets. Market authorizations in each country would be tracked in real time, ensuring quality teams learn of Health Authority (HA) approvals as soon as they are received.

When different functions and authorities can efficiently exchange the latest data, they can make confident decisions for faster delivery of medicines to patients. As Juhi Saxena, associate director of regulatory and clinical platforms at Moderna Therapeutics, explains: “After connecting quality and regulatory, the data and information required for change control doesn’t have to be requested or sit in someone’s inbox for two days. This has significantly reduced the time required to perform regional impact assessments and send that information on to supply chain and quality departments.”

Centralizing access to data and documents would also improve external collaboration between sponsors, CROs, and CDMOs. Given accountability lies with sponsors, some are consolidating their system landscape and prioritizing partners that can provide immediate access to live data. Contract partners are also doing their part by eliminating manual activities and non-secure external communication (such as email and shared drives) for greater traceability. For example, CDMO Forge Biologics moved toward a connected quality management platform for better compliance and faster turnaround on reviews and approvals with its clients.

Finally, sponsors with a good handle on data quality, ownership, and governance will drive business benefits beyond ESMP. At one global enterprise that initiated regulatory change through its master data management initiative almost a decade ago, the result is that the organization “now speaks one language.” Data integration means quality, regulatory, and safety will all work from the same set of product definitions across the value chain. Having standardized product definitions sets the stage for accelerated batch release decisions by making them traceable to quality and regulatory data.

One shared record, systemic benefits

EMA’s enhanced monitoring of drug availability through the ESMP has rightly shifted the focus to accurate and consistent product data. Getting this data in order sets the foundation for the strategic use of predictive analytics. Sponsors, their partners, and regulators will be capable of predicting shortages and mitigating their impact proactively.

For this to work, greater automation when interacting with regulatory bodies will be essential, both for ESMP and CTIS (the platform underlying EU CTR). That’s because automation supports data integrity by minimizing the chance of human error during data entry or other manual activities.

Seemingly intractable problems can be overcome by breaking them down into their constituent parts. By focusing on what they can control, biopharma companies and regulatory authorities will do their part in helping the industry meet its patient access goals and ensure timely delivery of medicines to those waiting for them.

By Stephan Ohnmacht, Vice President, R&D Business Consulting, Veeva

References

[1] ISPE, ‘European Shortages Monitoring Platform (ESMP): Essentials and Industry Reporting Requirements Webinar’, June 2024

The post From Data Silos to Streamlined Connectivity: How Biopharma Can Prepare for ESMP appeared first on .

Barts Health NHS Trust, which serves one of the largest and most diverse patient populations in the country, has become the first healthcare provider in the NHS to implement the medical research tool Anonymise and Export from medical imaging IT company Sectra. As part of wider activity, it means that researchers will be empowered to shed new light on diseases, tailor treatments, and potentially inform the next generation of healthcare AI.

Anonymise and Export has been implemented within the trust’s existing Sectra enterprise imaging solution, a system widely used by NHS diagnosticians to analyse patient scans. The cutting-edge addition will allow for the seamless export of medical images to a secure data environment, with patient identifiers automatically removed. This removes a previously manually intensive process, releasing time for busy NHS teams, whilst addressing crucial privacy safeguards, and dramatically expanding research possibilities.

The de-identified imaging data will be integrated into the new Barts Health Data Platform (BHDP), which was formally launched in April 2025. The platform brings together different types of health information — such as scans, health records, and lab results — into one secure system that researchers can apply to use.

Steven Newhouse, deputy chief information officer for Barts Health NHS Trust, said: “We are now able to provide researchers and clinicians with access to health and imaging data at a scale we’ve not offered before. With robust safeguards in place, this development supports more efficient, secure research and marks meaningful progress in advancing medical innovation and understanding of disease.”

Deployed with the support of Sectra and the NIHR Barts Biomedical Research Centre, Sectra Anonymise and Export opens new avenues for medical research, paving the way for more comprehensive and insightful studies.

Professor Sir Mark Caulfield, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Queen Mary University of London, said: “The NIHR Barts Biomedical Research Centre is delighted to have enabled this ground-breaking advancement in access to medical imaging for research. This system represents a pivotal moment in our field — a true game-changer that unlocks the potential of big data while steadfastly protecting patient privacy. This is an exhilarating time of transformation, and I am proud to be part of this innovative journey.”

Sarah Jensen, chief information officer for Barts Health NHS Trust, added: “The diversity and sheer volume of data being integrated means a significant leap forward in our healthcare data research capabilities. NHS professionals are under pressure as they work to deliver the best possible care for patients. Academics and researchers in continual pursuit of medical advancements, can play a key role delivering innovations urgently needed.

“Now, we can securely and safely provide the data they need on a scale not previously possible, whilst safeguarding confidentiality, and without our busy NHS teams being asked to spend time manually removing identifiable information. The possibilities are immense.”

The technological deployment sets the stage for sophisticated AI-powered analysis of medical images. By leveraging advanced pattern recognition algorithms, that are available within the Azure Cloud that hosts the BHDP, researchers will be able to uncover hidden insights and draw more nuanced conclusions from the extensive dataset.

Jane Rendall, UK and Ireland managing director for Sectra, said: “Healthcare professionals at Barts Health have been at the forefront of innovation with imaging technology for many years – using our platform to diagnose and inform care for a great many patients across East London. This latest initiative takes that innovation to another level, securely and safely harnessing imaging data in ways that could radically change how care is delivered. I look forward to seeing the impact emerge for healthcare and patients alike.”

The post Barts Health takes ‘Giant Step’ for Medical Research with Sectra appeared first on .

However, competition is becoming fierce and with today’s saturated market, it is becoming more challenging for companies to raise funds to stay in the game. Slowing investments, coupled with fragmented UK and European markets, mean that scaling fast is a must to be successful in this industry. How can companies readjust their growth strategy to succeed in the long run?

SAY Communications, a leading healthcare and technology PR & marketing agency, has launched a new report titled ‘Race to scale: Marketing and PR strategies to accelerate growth of remote patient monitoring companies’ which offers insights on how to navigate the increasingly competitive landscape and thrive in the digital health sector.

Stefi Rucci, MD at SAY Communications said: “Remote patient monitoring companies are no longer in a sprint, they’re in a marathon with hurdles. We’ve created this report to help companies build momentum, overcome market challenges and scale with confidence through strategic communications.”

Comms strategies have become essential for remote patient monitoring providers

With investment in the sector falling from a 2021 high of $57.2 billion to just $10 billion in 2024, the report argues that marketing and PR are no longer optional—they are essential growth levers.

The digital health boom may have peaked, but the race is far from over. SAY’s guide provides actionable insights and strategies to help companies succeed in the digital health sector. It includes:

• Trends that are shaping the market
• Growth strategies used by industry leaders
• Case studies of successful marketing campaigns

The report analyses the high impact moves that are helping leading RPM companies scale faster such as mergers and acquisitions, international expansion, and strategic partnerships, and the role of PR and marketing in each of these successful strategies. It includes real-world examples from companies like Huma, Current Health, and Definition Health, showcasing how targeted communications strategies have driven visibility, credibility, and commercial success.

The report also explores the critical role of brand storytelling, thought leadership, and data-driven messaging in building trust with investors, healthcare providers, and patients.

For companies looking at mergers and acquisitions to accelerate their growth, SAY recommends building a compelling brand story as a priority. The agency considers the ingredients of a successful PR programme, including thought leadership, internal communications, and a crisis playbook.

For companies expanding into new geographical, technological or therapeutic territories, refreshing their brand and sharpening messages tailored to each audience will be key, SAY says. Gathering insights from experts in these new territories, supported by the outsider perspective of an external comms agency, will help when building these messages.

For companies looking to forge new partnerships to help them expand their Remote Patient Monitoring business, agencies like SAY can support with crafting partnership comms’ messaging and outreach materials. The report looks at R&D company Camcon Medical who needed to kick start conversations with decision makers at chemical and medical device companies in order to identify potential partners to commercialise its innovative valve technology, which has the potential to revolutionise oxygen delivery in medical devices. SAY worked with the company’s business development team to clearly define the buying personas and the key issues that would prompt them to partner with an external company to upgrade their devices. The agency developed content marketing materials to address these topics and designed a global yet targeted Account Based Marketing (ABM) campaign, by identifying 50 companies to be approached. SAY leveraged LinkedIn ABM tools for laser-focused targeting that delivered high quality of leads.

Federico Marchisio, Associate Director, Digital at SAY Communications said: “In today’s digital health landscape, growth isn’t just about having the best and latest technology – it’s about engaging the right audience at the right time. This report is designed to help RPM companies do exactly that, with bold strategies and clever communications.”

The ‘Race to Scale’ report by SAY Communications is available to download here.

The post New Report Offers Effective Comms Strategies for Accelerating Remote Patient Monitoring Company Growth appeared first on .

In the US, nearly one in six adults is living with diabetes—95% of them with type 2. Around the world, the disease affects more than half a billion people. Alzheimer’s disease is another mounting challenge, with 6.9 million Americans over 65 currently diagnosed—a figure expected to double by 2060 and climb to 139 million globally by 2050.

To counter these rising numbers, billions of dollars are being poured into research and treatment—the diabetes drug market alone surpassed $88 billion in 2024. Now, a powerful new force has joined the fight: Artificial Intelligence.

But the real breakthrough isn’t AI working in isolation. It’s how healthcare providers and medical researchers are combining AI with advanced software tools and database technologies—especially knowledge graphs and GraphRAG (Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Together, these innovations are poised to revolutionise how AI delivers accurate, contextually relevant insights; amplifying its potential far beyond what AI alone could achieve.

Reimagining diabetes care for real-world patients

One of the most compelling examples of this innovation comes from US-based telemedicine startup Precina Health, which is pioneering a new approach to supporting patients living with Type 2 diabetes.

Managing this condition is complex, often requiring medication, lifestyle changes, and ongoing monitoring. For older adults in rural areas or patients struggling with technology, getting that support can be an uphill battle, so Precina’s model integrates daily support, medication management, lifestyle coaching, and virtual consultations into one seamless experience.

It’s all quite radical. “We’ve deconstructed the traditional approach to managing Type 2 diabetes and instead built a model that’s designed to work for every single patient,” says Josiah Bryan, the company’s CTO and lead AI researcher. “We’re taking a holistic view, factoring in everything to help each individual more effectively.”

But Bryan is clear: technology is the enabler, not the decision-maker. “I’m not legally allowed to practice medicine. And neither is my technology,” he stresses. “When we say we’re optimizing insulin management, that doesn’t mean the AI is doing some sort of linear regression or tweaking the prescription up and down.” Instead, AI acts as a powerful assistant to the doctor, helping clinicians deliver the ‘high-touch’ care necessary for long-term Type 2 diabetes management.

Using the AI machine to help the human doctor

Precina’s flagship system, the Precina Provider-Patient CoPilot (P3C), is a virtual assistant that joins virtual consultations, providing real-time prompts and personalised insights over video or voice. It offers far more than standard medical guidance, as it taps into the patient’s holistic health journey; in other words, P3C doesn’t just check blood sugar levels; it asks about home life, emotional wellbeing, even pets—because those details can significantly affect health outcomes.

Bryan’s team built an advanced tech stack, combining a relational database (MySQL), a custom LLM based on GPT-4o mini, a knowledge graph queried with Cypher, vector search techniques, and classical search algorithms like Monte Carlo tree search.

Central to P3C’s success is a customised knowledge graph, serving as the organising layer for everything from personal patient history to the latest research. When a clinician speaks with a patient, a real-time transcription runs through GraphRAG (retrieval-augmented generation), cross-referencing past conversations, medical records, and thousands of medical documents. This allows the system to surface the most relevant, personalised insights instantly.

He adds, “When a provider and a patient chat in Google Meet, a plugin extracts the audio, immediately transcribes it and is constantly extracting anything useful in real time by performing a GraphRAG search against the things you’ve talked about with them, their individual medical files, and thousands of pages of documentation that’s been indexed and sorted to give medical advice.”

Bryan sums it up: “That’s implemented with graph technology as a way to give a holistic view of where their patient is at in not just their medical journey but their emotional state.”

Precina’s innovations don’t stop with diabetes; his team has also created a voice-driven AI assistant accessible via a rotary phone, designed to help older adults and Alzheimer’s patients stay connected without needing modern devices.

Harnessing the power of AI

The Alzheimer’s community is also starting to see the benefits of knowledge graph-powered AI. At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center—one of the largest nonprofit academic medical centers in the U.S.—researchers are using graph technology to uncover new insights into the disease, with the goal of better understanding, and ultimately finding more effective ways to treat, Alzheimer’s.

Its initiative, the Alzheimer’s Disease Knowledge Base (AlzKB), gathers insights from more than 20 knowledge sources: genes, genetic links, drugs, biological pathways, symptoms, and more. Built on a graph database platform, it contains 234,000 nodes and 1.67 million relationships, organised around a detailed Alzheimer’s ontology.

From coin tosses to breakthrough

According to Jason Moore from Cedars-Sinai’s Department of Computational Biomedicine,  when used out of the box, generative AI models like ChatGPT are no better than flipping a coin when it comes to complex biological reasoning. For sure, ChatGPT can answer questions about Alzheimer’s or specific genes, but it cannot understand and reason across the dense web of relationships that underpin real medical insights.

To fix that, Cedars-Sinai integrated knowledge graphs with GraphRAG and the emerging concept of ‘Graph of Thoughts’ from Hugging Face. Now, users can query AlzKB without needing to learn specialist database languages like Cypher. Even better, thanks to the knowledge graph, the AI doesn’t just pull random facts, but reasons across the entire Alzheimer’s ecosystem to uncover new patterns and connections.

“Graph gives us a higher-level synthesis of the knowledge than we would get in any other way,” Moore explains. In other words, the knowledge graph doesn’t just store facts, but helps us reason across them, turning fragments into genuine insights.

Searching in the dark

The Cedars-Sinai team is particularly excited about using these tools to uncover hidden risk factors and potential treatments. While much of the research community focuses on the roughly 100 known Alzheimer’s-related genes, Moore is committed to pushing beyond the obvious. “Lots of people are looking under the lamp post of a known gene,” he says. “But what I’m interested in are the novel discoveries ‘over there’ in the ‘dark’—the insights that aren’t yet illuminated by existing research.” By combining AI and knowledge graphs, the team hopes to reveal patterns and connections that might otherwise stay buried.

Early results are promising. Machine learning models, informed by AlzKB, are surfacing previously unrecognised genetic contributors to Alzheimer’s, and even suggesting that common medications like Temazepam or Ibuprofen might be repurposed to treat certain symptoms more effectively.

Promising pathways

For Moore, “I think we’ve shown how we can tailor large language models and accurately query a big Alzheimer’s database, plus demonstrated how we can use the knowledge graph to inform machine learning to give us new ideas for treating this disease.”

The next step is to use knowledge graphs and machine learning pipelines to accelerate discoveries and scale this approach. Soon, researchers will be able to enter natural language prompts like, “Show me the genes linked to this drug and disease,” and the AI will run algorithms, highlight key features, and deliver clear, actionable insights. This could significantly speed up research efforts—and, ultimately, help bring new treatments to patients faster.

Across both these examples—and many others—what’s clear is that developers are increasingly turning to graphs and GraphRAG to unlock the true potential of big medical data and AI. With these tools, researchers and clinicians are no longer confined to searching under the brightest lamp posts where everyone else is already looking. Instead, they can explore the unknown, surfacing hidden relationships and overlooked treatments that could drive real medical breakthroughs.

In medicine, as in life, some of the most powerful answers aren’t found in the obvious, but in the questions no one thought to ask. With this new approach, are we finally learning how to ask them?

Dominik Tomicevic is the CEO of knowledge graph leader Memgraph

The post The AI Doctor Can’t Treat You Yet, But They Can Make Prescriptions Safer appeared first on .

But in the rush to address this dissatisfaction, we must be careful not to prescribe the wrong solution. While expanding access to GP appointments is part of the answer, it is not the whole solution. The deeper issue is one of navigation. Too many patients are trying to get GP appointments by default, when in fact, their needs could be better met by other professionals or services. To truly fix the system, we need to shift focus from simply “getting a GP appointment” to “getting the right care, at the right time, from the right person.”

A symptom of misalignment

The Nuffield Trust report reveals that only 24% of the public are now satisfied with general practice services – a steep decline from the 2010s, when satisfaction regularly hovered above 70%. Much of the dissatisfaction centres around access: long waits for appointments, difficulties contacting surgeries, and perceived rushed consultations. But beneath these frustrations lies a more fundamental problem, primary care is being asked to do too much, and patients don’t always know where to go for help.

General practice has become the default entry point for all health-related concerns, whether they’re clinical, administrative, or social. This leads to an overload of appointments that could have been managed more effectively by a pharmacist, a physiotherapist, or even digital self-help tools. If every road leads to a GP, the system becomes clogged and patients feel let down.

Understanding the ecosystem of care

Primary care should not be equated solely with GPs. It’s an ecosystem that includes practice nurses, mental health practitioners, pharmacists, and community services. Over the past decade, the NHS has invested in expanding this team through initiatives like the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS). Yet awareness and understanding of these roles among the public remains limited.

Many patients still believe they need to see a GP for everything from a repeat prescription to a sprained ankle because they haven’t been clearly shown otherwise. This is not a failure of patients; it’s a failure of communication and system design, and that’s why at X-on Health we have introduced Surgery Assist, an AI-powered digital assistant designed to transform patient access and navigation within general practice. If we don’t direct people to the right professional from the outset, we end up wasting time, creating bottlenecks, and eroding confidence in the system.

Digital triage and care navigation

True care navigation needs to be embedded within primary care teams. This includes both digital and human support—like trained care navigators who can listen to patients’ concerns and direct them appropriately. A receptionist trained in care navigation is no longer a gatekeeper; they’re a facilitator, helping patients understand their options and access the most effective care.

One of the most promising areas for improvement is digital triage. Used effectively, digital tools such as Surgery Assist can ask a few simple questions and quickly signpost patients to the most appropriate resource, whether that’s an in-person GP appointment, a video consultation, pharmacy advice, or community health support. AI-driven solutions such as this are already improving efficiency and patient outcomes at some practices. Take for example Tudor Lodge in South West London, where optimisation of their telephone systems and the implementation of Surgery Assist has resulted in a 21% reduction in their number of inbound calls and the number of missed calls reducing by two thirds.

Rebuilding trust through clarity

One of the key reasons for declining satisfaction is a sense of opacity – patients don’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes. If they cannot get an appointment they will often call back at 8am the following day, sometimes enduring long phone queues, and then told there are no appointments left.

We can start to rebuild trust by increasing transparency and signposting effectively. Let patients see what services are available. Communicate the roles of different practitioners clearly. Explain what “triage” actually means and how it helps ensure they get timely, effective care. Importantly, show that GP appointments are being preserved for those who genuinely need them while everyone else is still getting the help they need, but through a more appropriate route.

Data and feedback for better primary care

Improving navigation also means measuring how well it’s working. How many patients are being successfully redirected to pharmacy, how many just needed a repeat prescription? What’s the satisfaction rate for those interactions?

Many practices don’t have the tools in place to track patient journeys across different services, or if they do have they may not have been optimised to maximise the benefit. This is a huge missed opportunity. If we want to optimise the system, we need to know what’s working and what isn’t, at a granular level. Only then can we make informed decisions about where to invest and how to redesign access pathways.

Systemic change, not just sticking plasters

Satisfaction with GP services won’t be fixed by hiring more GPs alone, although workforce expansion is still crucial. Nor will it be solved by simply extending hours or offering more appointments. We need to reframe the conversation.

Our job as system leaders, clinicians, policymakers and digital health providers is to ensure patients are getting the support they need in the most efficient, timely and compassionate way possible. That means investing responsibly in systems to support receptionists. It means training staff to use the systems efficiently and it means designing access models that are inclusive, transparent and responsive.

With tools like Surgery Assist, healthcare providers can reduce pressure on overstretched GP services, streamline access to care, and empower patients to take control of their health. By embracing these innovations, the NHS can not only recover but also evolve into a more sustainable, patient-centric system that meets the needs of a modern, diverse population.

We can restore trust in primary care, but only if surgeries implement the right tools efficiently and effectively, signposting patients to the right information, and the right care.

By Sharon Hanley, Director of Primary Care, X-on Health

The post Why Better Patient Navigation, not just more GP Appointments, is the Key to Fixing Satisfaction in Primary Care appeared first on .

Yet, without proper oversight, the risks are substantial. For instance, the EU’s AI Act imposes severe penalties on life sciences companies deploying non-compliant systems. In this context, data is no longer merely a resource but a core strategic asset requiring active protection and management.

The growing data opportunity

The scale of data in life sciences is staggering. Pharmaceutical firms partner with thousands of study sites and tens of thousands of trial participants. A study by Tufts University found that Phase III clinical trials now generate an average of 3.6 million data points, tripling the volume collected a decade earlier. Amid this deluge of information, ensuring timely access to the right data is crucial to optimise R&D efforts, while reducing the time spent on data preparation and management.

Fragmentation compounds the challenge. A 2024 survey by Informatica shows that 41% of organisations have 1,000 or more data sources and nearly 60% use an average of five tools to manage them. As data increases in volume and becomes more fragmented, the need for a single consolidated solution to manage it becomes even clearer.

By consolidating data, companies can unlock numerous benefits. Sales teams can better understand trends and factors influencing their target accounts, procurement can leverage improved data visibility to collaborate more effectively with vendors and partners, and corporate M&A teams can achieve faster time to value by integrating an acquired company’s data, systems and applications more efficiently. As a result, drug discovery becomes more efficient, outcomes become more predictable and the insights from analytics become more reliable. At its core, success depends on robust data management practices that prioritise quality, accessibility, governance and protection.

Overcoming regulatory challenges

Life sciences is a highly regulated industry, requiring compliance with international standards, such as the CIOMS International Ethical Guidelines, ICH E6 Guideline for Good Clinical Practice and PhRMA Principles for Clinical Trials and Communication of Results. The introduction of the European Union’s AI Act, which came into force on 1st August 2024, adds another layer of complexity. Managing requirements across overlapping regimes makes establishing a single source of truth for patient data not just best practice but a business imperative. Effective data management is especially crucial to meeting the AI Act’s stringent governance and traceability requirements.

Consolidating data management under one platform allows life sciences firms to define clear responsibilities, policies and processes while streamlining workflows. A unified approach to metadata management ensures a consistent application of data protection and privacy measures, enabling companies to automate compliance and navigate the complexities of evolving regulations with confidence.

Preparing for AI adoption

Research from Cognizant and Oxford Economics forecasts that enterprise AI projects will leap from today’s experimentation to a period of confident adoption by 2026. The life sciences industry must prepare for this. Proper stewardship of patient and intellectual property data is a foundational element of any digital healthcare initiative, particularly when using AI, where transparency and reliability of outputs remain ongoing concerns.

AI can also play a transformative role in data management by automating complex tasks such as data extraction, classification and validation. This improves accuracy and accelerates compliance. In this sense, AI and data are interdependent—AI needs high-quality data, and modern data management increasingly relies on AI-driven efficiencies.

Scalable software with integrated AI engines can take on the heavy lifting of data ingestion, integration, governance and quality management. Advanced tools also allow non-technical users to access data products tailored for specific use cases like drug discovery, fostering greater collaboration and innovation.

For example, we worked with a global pharmaceutical brand who needed to advance its multi-year strategy to migrate its on-premises solutions to the cloud. Moving to the next phase required a single, trusted source of data for analytics that could be leveraged across the enterprise. The firm implemented an AI-powered SaaS data management and governance solution to consolidate data management and shift their legacy supply chain analytics to the cloud. As a result, development processes were simplified, delivering notable reductions in cost and time. Five million records could be loaded in 4 hours, vs. 19 hours required by the previous system. Since deployment, the new cloud-based data management solution has helped cut the time to manage new orders by 50%.

Establishing trust and taking control

Life sciences is no stranger to innovation, but today its eureka moments depend on data — data that is high-quality, compliant, secure and governed. Data management in a highly regulated global industry remains complex and costly. Companies must break down silos, integrate external data and comply with evolving regulatory landscapes. They also need to handle growing complexity in data types, formats and storage, while ensuring integrity and security. This is essential to foster trust and an environment of innovation.

Achieving this requires modernising data management to empower R&D teams to unlock new possibilities. From streamlining drug discovery processes to precisely targeting discreet patient populations, robust data systems can drive impactful change. As advanced analytics and generative AI drive a new wave of innovation, it’s essential that data management systems rise to meet the industry’s rising demands for speed, quality, compliance and innovation.

About the author

Rohit Dayama is a Global Client Partner within the Life Sciences practice at international professional services company Cognizant. With over 20 years of experience in consultancy services, he has specialised in the design and execution of complex digital transformation initiatives, leveraging AI and tech innovation to help leading pharma companies bridge the gap between technology and sciences, grow their businesses, and improve patient outcomes.

At Cognizant since 2017, Rohit has been serving multi-national clients as a strategic partner in establishing world-class digital capabilities, managing a variety of business transformations and achieving strong account growth.

The post Modern Data Management: The Foundation for Life Sciences Innovation appeared first on .

Up to now, local (country- or region-specific) literature monitoring has been seen as a necessary but inefficient part of pharmacovigilance (PV). The practice is expected if not mandated by many health authorities, being the only sure way to establish that adverse drug reactions and safety signals published in such journals, web sites and/or print sources, are identified and reported. If gaps in routine monitoring are discovered during inspections or audits, this could have implications for ongoing licensing and sales, not to mention market confidence.

At a strategic level, local safety insights allow pharmaceutical companies (as well as healthcare systems) to respond proactively to emerging concerns in particular populations. They might inform labelling or guidance at a country level as appropriate, and help guide ongoing product development.

Critical, but onerous

Despite its criticality, local literature monitoring is tremendously inefficient in its current form. It usually requires dedicated staff at an affiliate or regional level, potentially with local language capabilities and local journal access. Despite the considerable volumes of content being reviewed, local monitoring may yield only limited safety information; errors/omissions are commonplace too.

Because of its resource intensity, local literature monitoring is frequently outsourced to clinical research organisations. The process typically involves monitoring a diverse range of designated sources, listed in multiple, unwieldy Excel spreadsheets where findings are also logged. Assigned teams are expected to monitor several thousand different web sites on a weekly or monthly basis.

The challenge is compounded by substantial variances in the literature format, literature access issues and language barriers. Local sources tend to lack consistency in format, indexing and language, making it difficult to implement a simple unified process, while many local journals require paid subscriptions or may be only available in print.

Additionally, regulatory reporting timelines tend to vary by country, something else that has had to be tracked manually to ensure respective adherence.

All of these challenges above present a regulatory risk, as well as a risk to patient safety. This is due to the potential to miss safety events.

It is a situation that will only intensify, too. With the growing focus on specialty drugs including more personalised and targeted treatments in oncology and for rare disease, including new therapeutics such as CAR T-cell therapies, strong drug safety/PV oversight is essential.

It is for all of these reasons that the pharma industry and its service provider community are looking to next generations of automation technology for an answer.

Advanced automation offers a big part of the solution

So what is prompting process innovation? New technology enablement, involving large language models (LLMs), is proving instrumental firstly in structuring data – enabling “normalisation”, unification, centralised management, and governance of materials, as pharma transitions to “data-first” ways of working.

In parallel, advanced “crawling” techniques are transforming automated browsing, “scraping”, and indexing of content from target web sites and publications. AI can then add a further layer, making it possible to search all of that content very quickly and identify all relevant safety events on demand.

Of course, where patient safety is concerned, there will always be an important role for human oversight and process governance. (Technology-assisted human ingestion is another option, where companies are more hesitant about immediate technology reliance.)

Persisting without automation is hard to justify now, though. Most pharma companies have come to accept that, unless they buy into technology-enabled process innovation, they will struggle with continued operational viability in this challenging world economy. With easy, rapid access to the data they need, on the other hand, PV scientists could focus on the higher-value activities that form the core of their role, even as medical literature volumes explode.

The bigger picture beyond PV

As companies transition away from laborious manual processes in their literature monitoring, the strategic potential lies in the new, richer, data-driven insights they will gain about safety trends.

More broadly, this is an opportunity for companies to better understand the safety trends around their drugs – and at a more discrete level. As well as informing ongoing drug discovery and development, early population-specific insights could also inform the respective healthcare system and patient journey in a given region, with wider societal benefits.

A Biologit white paper further exploring this topic, can be downloaded here

About the author

Jean Redmond, PhD, is COO at Biologit. She is a scientist with 10+ years’ experience in consulting, strategy and general management gained by working with multiple life science offerings and teams at a global clinical research organisation (CRO). Biologit is a specialist in advanced, technology-enabled safety surveillance solutions for life sciences.

The post Pharmacovigilance Process Innovation – Why Reinvention of Local Literature Monitoring can’t wait appeared first on .

Open Medical has been engaged to use its PATHPOINT Referral Management platform to improve the quality of information in referrals to the service and determine the priority of requests.

The outcome should be a digitally enabled occupational therapy triage pathway that reduces the amount of time occupational therapists spend chasing and assessing referrals, releasing clinical capacity to address waiting lists.

The RCE is funded by the Moray Growth Deal in Scotland to support inward investment and jobs and, in line with this, the project should also create a new asset that Open Medical can commercialise for other services that need to balance rising demand with limited resources.

Marie Simpson, a programme manager at Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre, and a registered Occupational Therapist herself, said: “The RCE is a £5 million project funded by the UK government through the Moray Growth Deal to drive economic growth, with a particular focus on digital health and social care innovation in rural areas.

“We are raising the profile of the Moray region as a hot spot for digital companies that want to develop and test their ideas and innovation for health and social care. We have partnerships in place with the public sector and citizens to act as a test bed for innovation. This project is a great example of how we work in practice.

“The local occupational therapy service, managed by Health & Social Care Moray (HSCM), has been experiencing a rise in requests for support, so we looked at the pathway and at where digital could help. Now, we are working with Open Medical to improve the service model – improving the quality of referrals and triaging them automatically.

“The project should help Occupational Therapists, because they will be able to do more of the work they trained for, instead of office admin and chasing information. It should be better for citizens, because they will be able to get the support they need, faster, and it will create an asset that Open Medical can take to other services supported by DHI’s international networks.”

HSCM’s team of community Occupational Therapists and occupational therapy assistants provides support to people who need home adaptations or equipment to help with daily living tasks, such as toileting, accessing bathing facilities or managing stairs.

Anybody can make a referral to the service with the citizen’s consent, which is screened by the access care team and triaged by a qualified Occupational Therapist. However, at times, the service receives referrals that may be incomplete or not fully appropriate, requiring additional clinical time for prioritisation and impacting routine work.

Open Medical and the DHI held workshops with Occupational Therapists to understand the challenges and what they wanted from a new innovative digitally enabled service.

The company has integrated PATHPOINT Referral Management with the Mydex CIC Personal Data Store – an RCE R&D project that makes it easier for patients to upload information about themselves and share it with local health and care and third sector services.

The integration allows patients to enter their data once to re-use to access other services, reducing the need to repeat themselves, while improving the quality of information in the referrals that the occupational therapy service and other services receive.

Open Medical will also use the automation tools in PATHPOINT Referral Management to screen out ineligible referrals, to signpost people who don’t need the service back to the local Community Connections service directory linking people to sources of help, and to determine whether users need a digital or face-to-face assessment.

Dr Tim Hoogenboom, head of research at Open Medical, said: “It is fantastic to see the DHI taking a pro-active approach to finding digital solutions to address the problems faced by health and care services, while supporting companies with innovative ideas that extend their R&D.

“Our own approach to research and development is always to start by getting a real understanding of workflow, and we have really enjoyed collaborating with the DHI and the occupational therapy team in Moray to determine how our referral management toolkit can evolve.

“At the end of the day, the systems we build must adapt to, and be supportive of, the way that clinical teams work – and not the other way around. So, if the occupational therapists need something that our technology cannot support, we’re committed to developing that functionality.

“The testing phase of the project is about to start, so we look forward to feedback from users and the occupational therapy team on whether this new solution will work not just for them, but for occupational therapy services in the UK and globally.”

Open Medical is a specialist provider of patient flow solutions. Its PATHPOINT Referral Management product has been developed as part of its work in trauma, dermatology and other clinical specialties.

PATHPOINT Referral Management improves referral quality and data capture, enabling more streamlined patient triage and reviews, and provides two-way communications along the referral pathway.

In Moray, Open Medical has completed the integration of the PATHPOINT platform with the PDS and is about to test the new referral pathway with trial users.

There will then be a process of refining the new system, before a decision is made on whether to adopt it permanently. If the project is successful, Open Medical plans to commercialise the work to create a new occupational therapy product.

The post Innovative Project uses PATHPOINT Referral Management to Improve and Triage Referrals appeared first on .

During the general election campaign, Labour said “another top-down reorganisation of the NHS” was “the last thing” it wanted. Yet, less than a year after the general election, one is underway anyway, triggered by the decision to abolish NHS England, impose cuts on integrated care boards, and require trusts to cut non-clinical staff numbers.

The combination of reorganisation and cuts is likely to have a significant impact on NHS IT, as national programmes are moved or stopped, and ICB and trust priorities change. At a recent meeting, the Highland Marketing advisory board shared some early thoughts on the likely impact:

NHS England: cut in half and then abolished

What is happening? As soon as Labour came to power, responsibility for the policy and reform agenda started to shift toward the Department of Health and Social Care, where the team developing the 10 Year Health Plan is based.

In February, NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard announced a “brutal restructuring” of NHS England, before standing down herself. Just a few days later, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced “the world’s largest quango’ would be abolished entirely.

In a follow-up statement, health and social care secretary Wes Streeting gave two reasons for the move. First, NHS England has failed. The NHS is spending more money and has more staff than it did when Labour left power in 2010, he argued, but it is delivering worse outcomes and lower patient satisfaction.

Second, the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England are “two large organisations doing the same roles” and “when money is tight, such bloated and inefficient bureaucracy cannot be justified.” Transition chief executive Sir Jim Mackey wants the reorganisation to be complete within two-years.

Highland Marketing advisory board discussion: Highland Marketing advisory board members were shocked by the way the abolition of NHS England had been handled. “The way it was announced was diabolical,” said Ian Hogan, a trust chief information officer. “You have to feel for the way many staff found out” (which was often through the media).

Looking at the longer term, our experts were concerned that the changes have announced ahead of the 10 Year Health Plan. When, logically, a restructure might have been expected after the plan and delivered as part of the workforce and digital strategies that will be needed to flesh out its ideas.

“What was needed was reform, not a restructure,” said entrepreneur Ravi Kumar, “and nobody can see a reform agenda in what is happening.” This, he argued, is bad news for staff and patients, who will need to be onside with any changes proposed.

Nor does it help the suppliers that will be needed to deliver the government’s shift from ‘analogue to digital’ and enthusiasm for AI. “The government needs to give a strong steer to the private sector about where to invest, and that is not coming across,” Ravi Kumar said. “At the moment, all we are seeing is chaos.”

One aspect of the chaos is the lack of clarity about what will happen to NHS England’s digital responsibilities and programmes. Until 2019, most aspects of NHS IT sat with an arms-length body, NHS Digital. Then former health secretary Matt Hancock set up NHSX as joint unit with the DHSC.

Then NHSX was abolished, and NHS Digital became part of NHS England’s transformation unit. Now, it will probably transfer to the DHSC in some form. Although there are other options. Neil Perry, a former trust CIO who now works as a consultant, pointed out that the Government Digital Service has been revamped.

“That could be an opportunity to align the NHS with other developments across government, and to get all the government digital services moving in the same direction,” he argued. David Hancock, a former supplier exec and interoperability expert, agreed; although he also felt the government is “making it up as they go along” and being driven more by finance and headlines than strategic planning.

The centralisation of NHS IT, wherever it ends up in Whitehall, could have benefits for suppliers. James Norman, a former trust CIO who now works on the supplier side, argued it could disrupt existing relationships and create room for new ideas.

“There is an opportunity to put a system in place to open up information [about strategies and procurements] and to operate in a more open and collaborative manner,” he said. Although there’s also a risk that the large, often US, tech firms that can afford to employ lobbyists and sponsor the kind of think-tanks that generate ‘big ideas’ for ministers will become even more dominant. 

Integrated care boards: cuts push consolidation

What’s happening? The abolition of NHS England overshadowed an equally seismic shift in the set-up of the NHS; namely, an overhaul of the functions of integrated care boards, coupled with cuts to their operating costs of 50%.

On his first day back at NHS England, Sir Jim Mackey wrote to system leaders to say ICBs should focus on ‘strategic commissioning’ and population health management, with other functions moving to the centre or providers.

The idea could be to refocus ICBs on their original remit, which was to join up services and drive prevention. Which would put them in a stronger position to deliver the 10 Year Health Plan. However, ICBs will be bigger but weaker and more limited organisations in future.

So, the impact could be to shift the integration and transformation agenda towards providers (creating ‘accountable care organisations’ in the US terminology). Whatever the outcome, cost reduction plans must be in place by October.

Advisory board discussion: Highland Marketing advisory board members were surprised at the scale of the changes to integrated care boards, and the speed at which the conversation had moved from cuts, to consolidation, to a target of just 23-28 ICBs across the country.

They were also surprised at the scale of the reduction in ICB responsibilities set out in NHS England’s ‘model ICB’ blueprint. This indicates that more than a dozen functions will ‘transfer’ to the regional bodies, trusts, or ‘neighbourhood health providers’ – new bodies recommended in the ‘Fuller Stocktake’ that are forming around primary care networks, but don’t really exist yet.

Cindy Fedell, a former trust CIO who now works in Canada, said she was concerned about the focus on savings and reorganisation when policy and structure is still in flux.

“I am really worried about place,” she said, “because ICBs are getting bigger while the neighbourhood idea is still being worked out. We know that a population of around 50,000 (like Bradford, where she used to work) is where you can really make a difference.”

Nicola Haywood-Cleverly, a former trust CIO who works as a non-executive director, also argued there is a danger of a gap opening-up between policy at a national level and delivery on the ground.

“Unless we give leadership to neighbourhood partnerships and direct them to work collaboratively to serve the whole person, families and local communities, there is a risk that we will continue to offer poor and fragmented services to citizens,” she said.

In IT terms, the model ICB document says that responsibility for data will move to a new national body; but ICBs will still be expected to carry out analysis for population health management. Digital leadership and transformation will shift back to providers.

It is less clear what will happen to the primary care IT support that ICBs inherited from their predecessor bodies. The model just says that options will be considered to create a “consistent offer” for GPs. CIOs contacted by digitalhealth.net felt that shifting responsibility for digital to trusts is a backward step.

They argued it will reduce opportunities to secure economies of scale in big IT procurements and reduce the incentive for trusts to pick common or even interoperable systems. However, Neil Perry pointed out the way in which ICBs approach IT is very variable, currently.

While some have IT leads on their boards, most don’t or lean on the CIO at their largest trust. Similarly, only a handful have managed to ‘converge’ local EPR systems, mature their shared care records, or build their own analytics capacity.

So, the model may just be providing useful clarity. “If suppliers were asking me what to do, I would say build a partnership with providers,” he said, “and that is always the case.

NHS trusts: cuts drive job losses

What is happening? Trusts have also been told to deliver significant cash improvement programmes, close a projected £7 billion deficit, and reduce their “corporate cost growth” – or the additional amount they have been spending on corporate functions since the year before the pandemic – by 50% this year. 

Sir Jim has suggested trusts should look at transferring staff to wholly owned subsidiary companies, which get favourable VAT treatment. But the first response of most providers has been to look for job losses.

The NHS Confederation has estimated that trusts could have to shed between 3% and 11% of their workforce; or 40,000 to 150,000 people. NHS Providers has predicted there will still be longer waiting lists and cuts to services, with maternity, palliative care, prevention, and virtual wards in the firing line.

Advisory board discussion: The advisory board felt the cuts that are being made at trusts are symptomatic of the general rush to cut costs before bigger policy and structural issues have been thought through.

David Hancock argued that the 10 Year Health Plan is likely to require more digital, data, and analytics expertise, not less. “The government wants to see a shift from analogue to digital, but that’s not just about buying devices or software,” he said.

“You need implementation capacity, and to be able to optimise and maintain systems.” Similarly, he noted, the government wants to see the rapid take-up of AI and has just put out guidance on the use of ambient listening technology.

That is likely to reduce administrative jobs and tasks: “but we’ll need more IT people.” The model ICB document also assumes that providers can pick up digital leadership and transformation, while reducing headcount. Which Ian Hogan said is not realistic.

“There has been growth in my department, but it has not been ‘unwarranted’,” he said. “We haven’t randomly decided to grow something like cyber security. But from a financial perspective it’s difficult to justify, because the benefit isn’t seen by us, but by the clinical teams, which are protected (even though there has been considerable growth in clinical staff numbers).”

Speed is making a challenging environment even more challenging, he added. “NHS England is wanting to make savings in-year and they are asking for a plan to do it by the end of May,” he said. “But from a digital perspective, there is no low-hanging fruit left.”

The advisory board warned that amid the uncertainty, a lot of experienced people are likely to leave, taking their organisational memory and contacts with them. Trusts may need to look at bringing in consultants and service companies to plug gaps.

James Norman argued this could be a benefit to trusts, if third-parties bring new approaches, partners, and ideas with them. However, this is unlikely to be cheap. Also, it’s not clear that this is what the government wants to happen.

“Everybody is focused on the £7 billion deficit that trusts are looking at this year,” said Nicola Haywood-Cleverly. “But all they have done is chunk it up for each organisation and tell them to focus on headcount reduction. That’s going to have all sorts of consequences, and more of it needs to be thought through at a national level.”

About the Highland Marketing advisory board        

The Highland Marketing advisory board includes: Jeremy Nettle (chair), formerly of Oracle and techUK; Cindy Fedell, regional chief information officer at North western Ontario Hospitals, Canada; Nicola Haywood-Cleverly, a former integrated care system chief information officer, non-executive director for NHS foundation trusts, and health tech strategist and advisor; Andy Kinnear, former director of digital transformation at NHS South, Central and West Commissioning Support Unit and now consultant at Ethical Healthcare; Ravi Kumar, health tech entrepreneur and chair of ZANEC; Dr Rizwan Malik, consultant NHS radiologist and director of SMR Health Tech Consultancy; James Norman, EMEA health and life science director, Pure Storage; Ian Hogan, CIO at the Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust; Neil Perry, former director of digital transformation at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust and now director at Synergy Digital Health Innovation; David Hancock, digital health strategist specialising in interoperability; Jane Brightman, director of workforce strategy at Skills for Care; Jason Broch, GP and CCIO at Leeds Health and Care Partnership.  

About Highland Marketing           

Highland Marketing is a specialist marketing, communications, market access and consultancy agency, focusing on the health tech and med tech industries. We offer an integrated range of services, covering all elements of the marketing mix, to help organisations achieve their goals by ensuring their messages are heard, understood, and acted upon by their chosen audiences. Our highly experienced and well-connected team has deep knowledge of health and care technology, strong contacts in the industry, and is well-versed in delivering effective campaigns and content. We support clients across the NHS and EMEA healthcare markets and work with clients looking to expand from the UK into international markets, and with overseas companies looking to enter the UK market.       

Website: www.highland-marketing.com  X: @HighlandMarktng

The post Reorganisation, Consolidation, and Cuts: What are the implications for NHS IT? appeared first on .