Spending less on digital: how better software can save the NHS millions

The UK government has demanded that NHS England finds ways to reduce core NHS spending - to around £330 million compared to the sum agreed in the 2021 spending review, and after other adjustments such as increased employer pensions costs, according to the Health Service Journal.

This comes as a consequence of needing to find funding to deal with the government’s ‘Living with COVID’ plans and the cost of the public health policy around test and trace, says Julian Kelly, NHSE chief financial officer.

Kelly went on to say that achieving this cut would likely involve ‘slowing down’ some transformation programmes and ambitions from the NHS long-term plan, including ‘how fast we go on the technology change, on some of the innovation stuff we have spoken about… and the prevention programme’.

Dan Teare, healthcare sector director for mpro5, believes there is a simple solution the NHS should be implementing to save money without reducing quality of care: “Digital transformation is a vital undertaking for any organisation in the modern world, and it will get easier and cheaper as the journey goes on, as well as improving efficiency and reduce overall costs. However, it often takes some initial investment to get that process started. Yet, that is not always the case. NHS Trusts use a wide variety of software, which ends up costing millions to adopt and deploy. By consolidating their digital needs into a single, adaptive and effective piece of software, standardised throughout the relevant parts of the health service, rather than spending more money on multiple expensive and inefficient digital tools all doing different things, the NHS can both save money and digitally transform.”

Whilst digitalisation is a key objective for the NHS, and new digital technologies are helping Trusts to work smarter than ever, the implementation of such software can be strained, especially when trying to find software for individual needs and also cut down on expenses.

Dan Teare continued: “Few would disagree with a vision of digitalisation driven by cutting costs, improving service levels and streamlining the day-to-day processes of NHS workers. Yet too many NHS Trusts and NHS organisations misunderstand the fundamentals of digitalisation and, as a result, continue to get software and software procurement wrong. It is important that NHS Trusts find smarter ways to save on tech without cutting corners in terms of quality of care. Utilising a singular yet configurable platform instead of procuring a multitude of single-instance software

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