That means the government has now set aside £500m – which is expected to be matched by local health and care trusts to make up a total of £1bn – to make the NHS "paperless" by 2018. In May this year, the Department of Health said it wanted to tear up the NHS's clumsy system of printed prescriptions – and instead use "unique barcodes" to dish out medication straight to the poorly. The government contributed £260m to that plan.
Under those proposals, paperwork listing medicines and drugs will be sent directly from doctors' surgeries to pharmacies, bypassing the need for ill Brits to pick up the printed slips and take them to a suitable shop to process. Funding for the plan is undergoing a second-stage evaluation, with successful bidders for a piece of the £1bn expected to be announced at the end of October. Hunt thinks such measures will help reduce human error.
But the plan will rely heavily on robust IT systems crunching highly personal patient data that has already alarmed privacy advocates who are concerned about that information being in the hands of corporations. The £240m added to the pot this week is intended, the DoH said, to "help deliver the government’s commitment to allow everyone to book GP appointments and order repeat prescriptions online by March 2015, as well as give everyone who wants it online access to their GP record." It added: "One of the key things the money will be spent on will be systems which allow hospitals, GP surgeries and out of hours doctors to share access to patients’ electronic records."
Source: The Register
