Plan to digitise NHS will fall short without extra investment, says spending watchdog

Ambitious plans to transform digital services in the NHS in England over the next decade are unlikely to be achieved without substantial extra funding, the government’s spending watchdog has warned.

In a report published on 15 May the National Audit Office said that progress towards the government’s 2014 digital strategy for the NHS had been slower than expected, including a failure to deliver a headline target of a paperless health service by 2018.1

NHS trusts now have a revised target to reach a “core level of digitisation” by 2024. But the NAO said it was “not convinced” that lessons from previous “expensive and largely unsuccessful” attempts at NHS digital transformation were being applied to the current strategy, launched …