Paperless NHS must be achieved quickly: Tim Kelsey

In light of Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s call for the NHS to go paperless by 2018, national director for patients and information on the NHS Commissioning Board, Tim Kelsey, has said that this must happen quickly despite it being a big challenge, or “we won’t have an NHS any longer”.

According to Kelsey, all patient records should be available online and “if that takes as long as it took in financial services, where it took 25 years to go from agreement on what the identifier would be for an individual to a system which was launched, Cahoot, for a fully functional, transactional-based transparent customer service. If we take anything like that, we’re out. The NHS will not be sustainable.”