The Journal of mHealth Vol 2 issue 5 (Oct) | Page 23

Building Connected Ecosystems

Building Connected
Health Ecosystems
By Keith Nurcombe
Keith Nurcombe has worked in healthcare for over twenty years spending the last few years working with
businesses in the health and technology space, most recently building O2 Health where he was Managing
Director until the end of 2012, since then he has been providing consultancy services to businesses.
For me, this is key - what can be done,
and how we can really take healthcare
forward digitally?
There are always questions about how
can this system or this application make
a difference to patients or users or possibly change the way that certain practices
are delivered?
In healthcare we often forget about how
we build a really connected ecosystem,
where multiple systems interact and
deliver a better experience for the user,
patient or citizen than the individual systems on their own.
Sounds easy, I know, but it is something
that those of us working within digital
healthcare have to really focus on.
By example, in the UK market - where
we are in the infancy of this kind of
connected ecosystem - billions of
pounds have been spent trying to link
healthcare systems together in a connected way - i.e. to allow your primary
care physician to speak to your specialist and use the same system which you,
as the patient, can also see and interact
with. You can even decide who to share

your records with, dangerous in some
people’s eyes but radical and refreshing for others. All this means you own
and control your own data and health
record. Unfortunately, in the UK, this
remains a pipe dream. Currently primary care systems don’t even talk to
secondary care systems, let alone the
wider world.
Here’s my dream – if we could first
get primary care systems talking to
specialists in hospitals, we could then
add social care to the mix followed by
mental health services and then government systems such as social su pport and tax systems. Only then will
we be at a place where we have a truly
connected user, patient, citizen who
has access, through a single sign-on,
to all the services that they might need
through multiple agencies.
The real question for me is, why is this a
pipe dream and not already a reality?
Well I think there are a number of reasons for this:
»» Often the providers of these systems don’t want to allow interactiv-

ity because that damages their commercial opportunities and control
going forward.
»» The government procurers of these
systems are often too concerned
with permissions, legality, data protection between countries, protection of patient information (which
is rarely a patient issue at all), as
well as multiple contract issues with
legacy systems.
»» We have never done it and it is too
easy to find reasons not to rather
than to find reasons to try and see
what happens.
What I want as a user, patient or a citizen
is one entry point that gives me access to
anything I want, ideally with one log-in
and one password - so why can’t I have
this simple (in my eyes) request?
I would like the people that procure and
manage and the organisations that innovate to think about connecting it all up
and not delivering it in little pieces that
I have to try and put together myself,
it shouldn’t be that hard in my eyes...
maybe next year eh? n

The Journal of mHealth

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