Blog posts by Dr Geraint Lewis

Last month, the Commons’ public accounts committee published a pretty damning report on the NHS National Programme for IT in England, Connecting for Health.  The committee’s analysis looked specifically at the development of a single care record.  This is a set of electronic notes for each patient that can – with the patient’s permission – be accessed by clinicians working in different parts of...

I was in Glasgow earlier this month speaking at a British Geriatrics Society (Scotland) symposium about community services for older people.  Two things struck me: first, how refreshing it was to be at a conference where England’s Health and Social Care Bill was barely mentioned; and secondly the abundance of practical examples of health care integration from across Scotland.

One of the major criticisms of the Health and Social Care Bill was that its emphasis on promoting...

I was in Lisbon last week to speak at a chronic disease workshop run by the National School of Public Health.  Both the English and the Portuguese health services currently face a significant funding squeeze, and policymakers in the two countries see chronic diseases as an area ripe for potential cost savings.  However, in Portugal the focus is on different chronic diseases from those on which we concentrate in this country. Moreover, the emphasis in Portugal is on reducing the expected costs of these chronic diseases, whereas in the UK we tend to focus on preventing the...

Good news stories don’t come around that often for Connecting for Health, the beleaguered national IT programme for the National Health Service in England.  But I think I might have found one in the making.  This month marks the mid-way point in a two-year project to build an “open-source community” for the NHS. 

For the uninitiated, open-source software is different from the “closed source” software that...