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The development of critical digital infrastructure for delivering the healthcare services of the future are under threat from budget cuts, as a healthcare leader cautions against short term fixes that will undermine innovation and long-term sustainability.

Professor George Crooks, Chief Executive of Scotland’s national digital health and care innovation centre, told a Scotland Policy Conference meeting that the country has been “blessed by consistency of political will” to take forward the digital health and care transformation.

Professor Crooks told delegates during his keynote address that this must continue if Scotland has any hope of tackling the modern challenges facing healthcare.

Simply pushing the NHS “harder and faster” to deal with growing demands will not work, he explained.

Outdated IT infrastructure now poses a serious hurdle to progress in Scotland and urgently need replaced, according to Professor Crooks.

He said any decision to not invest in the future at this critical time will have serious consequences down the line:

“Slashing the digital budget is not the way for us to deliver sustainable services.

“To cut down innovation, to cut down investment in digital care, health and care technology and supporting the workforce and digital skills is short termism that sadly, many governments revert to in times of stress.

“My plea to our political wards and masters is: do not replicate the mix the mistakes of the past as we move towards an ever more challenging but potentially brighter future.

“We need to maintain a consistent and evidenced policy driver, underpinned by strategies, the top-down approach across the service, which has to run longer than the life of any one parliament.”

It comes just a month after Finance Secretary Shona Robison announced digital health trial development will be ‘paused’ for the rest of the year, as part of more than £115m of health and social care cuts.

Professor Crooks told delegates that it is important that Scotland shifts the balance of care towards the community and seizes the opportunities presented by cloud computing, while working across the sector to make sure nobody is left behind.

Creative solutions through technical, service and business innovation will be key to achieving these goals, he explained.

He highlighted the use of digital diagnostics in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde's services for both COPD and cardiac failure as recent success stories.

The use of data in the delivery of more effective and personalised health services was also raised by Professor Crooks as something Scotland is already doing well in.

However, linking data from people’s health and care records with other datasets in a way the public can trust will open up even more opportunities for innovation if Scotland can get it right, he added.

Professor Crooks explained the future will be about “moving from a walled garden approach, where we lock our data way into a much more fertile and innovative approach, where we use data for the reasons that actually will benefit our individual citizens”.

He continued:

“The key message I want to give today is that the world is changing. The challenges that we have today in the 21st century are similar, but subtly different, to those of only 20, 25 years ago.

“The problem is we are still deploying 20th century solutions to address those 21st century challenges, and that needs to change.

“Simply looking to drive the system harder and faster, to cope with increased capacity and increasing demands is not going to work today or in the future.

“We must think differently. We must think digital.”