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Why is the NHS lagging so far behind in tech?

In an age where technology seems to advance in leaps and bounds almost daily, Pete Curtis knows firsthand how far behind our health service has fallen – and what it could cost

Wednesday 12 February 2020 23:32 GMT
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The idea that typing in a patient’s name and seeing all their results in one place is still an idle fantasy...
The idea that typing in a patient’s name and seeing all their results in one place is still an idle fantasy...

Towards the end of the 20th century, an entirely new discipline emerged in aviation. An offshoot of a field known as visual science, it led aircraft engineers to change the layout of instruments in the cockpit of a fighter plane. At the breakneck speed of an aerial dogfight, a pilot’s ability to read their control panel might just save their life, so instrument panel layout remains a very important field.

How, for example, should we rank the altimeter in comparison to airspeed? And should either of these instruments be made more obvious than the radar? With the advent of the head-up display, the speciality changed again. Engineers had to decide which information should be projected onto a pilot’s visor and which instruments left on the physical control panel in front of them.

As a doctor within the NHS, I have often wished that this same ethos could be embraced by the health service. Thus far, there has been little or no progress.

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