Chris Watson is the Operations Manager on our Software Product Management Team, managing a team of Product Executives and Product Specialists. He has over 14 years' experience at CMS in the hugely successful Software Team.
One of the challenges for implementing pervasive healthcare is that every single conversation that’s had over a remote call really should be recorded and therefore the information should be saved somewhere. I know that the NHS in England does save a lot of information. X-rays are stored for the life of the patient, for example. When you go to see a doctor, they currently don’t record every single conversation, but they will enter notes into their system like they used to when people saw doctors face-to-face.
My thinking is that it would be good if each conversation could be recorded and stored in case anyone ever needed to refer to it. In reality, I don’t think that is going to happen purely because of the amount of data that would be created off the back of this. The type of data also needs to be considered - video, call recordings, audio recordings are all large data and cannot be de-duped or compressed.
Doctors’ surgeries in the UK are all like a trust now. So, instead of it just being one surgery in one village and another surgery in another village, there is a whole group of them all together. They therefore need a more comprehensive IT infrastructure – they will need servers, storage, networking, backup etc. and we at CMS Distribution supply plenty of these solutions.
In terms of the type of vendors that could help with this, Scale Computing would work well because it is a relatively simple, low-cost solution and is relatively safe and secure because they have a three-node cluster that they work on. In fact, many of our vendors could be beneficial to these trusts, especially Infortrend, QNAP and Synology for storage, Arcserve or Acronis for backup, ESET or Barracuda for security and DrayTek for networking.
We now have an NHS app that you get your COVID pass through and this is something that the back-end NHS have got. On this app, we have our NHS COVID Pass but we also have options to “View your GP health record” and “Order a prescription”. You can also set appointments for a GP’s surgery. I’m not sure how long this app has been around and whether or not people have been using it regularly but the driver to get everyone using this now is COVID-19.
The system is there, but it is not very good at the moment but I guess it will get better. The challenge is to make the system a lot better. But now part of the challenge might be that they haven’t got the back-end systems, servers and the storage capability to be able to handle all of this data. This would involve the NHS app needing to be connected into the systems in each doctor’s surgery so they can see the appointment system, or have a centralised, national booking system.
How can we help with that? The actual system will be bespoke and costly but at CMS we have the capability and capacity to develop custom integrations between multiple different information systems due to our close relationships with our vendors. As a value-add distributor, we have the technical expertise in-house to work on project exactly like this.
Patient data is hugely sensitive and if it gets in the wrong hands, a lot of damage could be done, including but not limited to identity theft, so it needs to be secure and it needs to be sat behind proper firewalls. The information obviously needs to be backed up, but it also needs to be encrypted so people cannot hack in and gain access to all that data and information.
The challenge in the UK that the NHS has got is that every single doctor’s surgery traditionally has just had its own servers, its own storage, probably poor systems that are not updated very often and they often don’t have anyone on-site who is particularly IT literate - the people who work there train as healthcare professionals, not IT professionals. Certainly, the local doctor’s surgery in the town I live in hasn’t got an IT manager so they rely on external companies to do a lot of their work for them. The government is looking at doing a roll-out of the NHS app on one side and the doctors’ surgeries are doing their own separate things. So, it is not joined up and who knows if it ever will be?
If it does happen, Red Hat could present a great opportunity - it's low cost, it's secure, it's stable. All the key factors in building a public system on a national scale. For the data to be hosted in the cloud rather than on-premise could present data or compliance problems, however due to the size of data being stored a hybrid approach would be an effective solution in terms of both cost and practicality.
In general, obviously with COVID-19 and everything that has happened, a lot of medical appointments have been done virtually and doctors have discovered they can see more patients in the same time frame this way - I think that will probably continue for a long time.
There are a number of hospital trusts that use Arcserve backup or UDP and I believe Great Western Hospital in Swindon are just about to increase their estates. Hospitals have an immense amount of data. Every single X-ray that is taken of every single person has to be kept for the life of the patient and it has to be accessible and it has to be stored and encrypted.
Arcserve has got a really slick and easy-to-use and install backup and recovery tool and they have an immutability solution called OneXafe which means that once it is written it can never be overwritten; vital for keeping secure, reliable patient records.
There are often trials and studies for scientific research where individuals put themselves forward for a test. Let’s give a recent example: with the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, the government was looking for people to go and be measured and they gave some people a vaccine (and others were not given a vaccine) and then analyse how the vaccine affects their life or find out if it gives them any side effects.
Unless you are doing something out of the ordinary, the law will not allow any scientific study to just grab patients’ data and use whatever is there without consent. Your medical records can only be used for scientific research if you have specifically opted in.
With regards to people who decide to go for a clinical trial, how do they keep that information safe? It's simple – the data that is generated needs to be kept secure, encrypted and backed up. And to do that, they need to have an effective Information Management solution.