Former digital champion to work out practicalities on promoting take-up with National Information Board
Martha Lane Fox has been appointed to lead the government’s work on promoting the take-up of new digital technologies in healthcare.
The appointment of the former government digital champion and co-founder of lastminute.com was announced by health secretary Jeremy Hunt. Lane Fox’s main task will be to develop practical proposals for the National Information Board (NIB), the body responsible for the campaign.
Hunt said: “If we are to embrace the potential for technology to shift power to patients, we need patients to be willing and able to harness that technology. Digital inclusion is as vital in healthcare as everywhere else - not least because some of the greatest impacts of new technology in health is with the most vulnerable patients.”
The move is the latest in a campaign to push the use of new digital technologies, including mobile apps and social networks, in healthcare. It comes days after the NHS announced plans to make a bunch of new solutions that use IT more widely available to pilots under the NHS Innovation Accelerator.
Last week the NIB announced a series of engagement events; and in March it kicked off a programme to produce a number of priorities for digital healthcare as part of the Personalised Health and Care 2020 framework.
One of the challenges for organisations taking up new technologies will be to align them with the plan for an electronic care record by 2018, and for patients to have access to their GP records.
