Making Connections: A transatlantic exchange between the VA and NHS (Free report)

Thanks to “an unrestricted educational grant from NHS 3millionlives and Robert Bosch” the consultancy 2020health has produced a wide-ranging and freely available 90-page report comparing the US’s Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and the UK’s NHS’s experience in introducing and using various forms of technology. I nearly missed flagging up this item for Telehealth and Telecare Aware readers because the 2020health press release about it only mentioned the desire to help NHS to become ‘paperless’! However, when a trusted reader drew my attention to it I took a second look and found that more than half the report concerns home telehealth, telemedicine and mobile health. From a UK perspective, the round-up of what the VHA has done on telehealth was useful and contains strong pointers to what the NHS needs to do to start adopting telehealth into its care pathways. Unfortunately, after reading the NHS section I came away with the impression that despite the small scale successes, really large scale adoption will remain something to which we will only ever aspire as long as the NHS remains so fragmented (and the Government’s Ministerial ‘leadership’ maintains its toxic reputation with the people who need to commission and implement telehealth – to be clear, that’s my interpretation, not the report’s). Read it yourself and tell us in the comments if you draw different conclusions. Making Connections: A transatlantic exchange to support the adoption of digital health between the US VHA and England’s NHS.

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