The Health Tech Alliance, a coalition of health technology companies, has today called for increased funding to be made available to Integrated Care Systems to accelerate the adoption of cloud-based technologies across the health system.
The call is one of a series of recommendations featured in the Health Tech Alliance’s report ‘Key Recommendations to Accelerate Cloud Adoption’ which sets out how industry, the health service and policy makers can work together to improve the take-up and use of cloud technologies to make a real difference to the day-to-day running of the NHS. The report, sponsored by NetApp, builds on a roundtable session held with expert contributors, Health Tech Alliance members and the broader health tech community in Autumn 2021.
In addition to calling for further ICS funding, the report recommends:
- A detailed and nationwide assessment of current data infrastructure used across the health system should be undertaken.
- Streamlining of the responsibility for cloud adoption within the health service.
- Collaborative working between ICSs which are further along the cloud adoption journey to develop a route map to cloud.
- More joined up working amongst industry players to support the NHS and its staff to address the cloud skills and capability gap.
- Better and more far-reaching education on the benefits of the use of cloud in research and innovation in the health sector.
Although a great deal of progress has been made in recent years across the NHS in terms of digital transformation and the adoption of cloud-based technologies, there is still a varied picture with pockets of the system still lagging behind. Given the ability of such technological solutions to address the fundamental challenges facing the system, the Health Tech Alliance urges policy makers, the health service and the wider health tech community to consider these recommendations in full.
Commenting on the report, Health Tech Alliance CEO Nicholas Lansman said: “The wide-ranging benefits that the cloud can bring to patients and the system – from facilitating the use of AI and machine learning to support diagnosis, to supporting the sharing and analysis of COVID-19 data – are increasingly well known across the system but still knot universally adopted and deployed. With the myriad pressures and challenges facing the health system currently, the need to accelerate the adoption of cloud-based solutions has never been greater. It is imperative that the momentum of recent years and desire for change is built on to ensure that the entire health system is able to access the full benefits that the cloud can bring.”