We have delivered significant new digital innovations for the NHS over the past 12 months, starting with the citizen-facing tools that underpin a more patient-centred model of care: the NHS App, NHS 111 online, and the NHS login. Our nationwide services, including electronic referrals, electronic prescriptions and the Summary Care Record have all been enhanced and extended. More than 90% of first outpatient appointments in England are now made electronically, compared to about 66% in March last year.
We began to modernise clinicians’ and social care professionals’ access to patient information, improving safety, efficiency and outcomes. Initiatives such as GP Connect, Child Protection - Information Sharing and the National Record Locator are helping our digital services keep in step with the reconfiguration of care settings and care pathways. All these innovations signal a more fundamental shift towards an integrated and open IT and data environment across all of our health and care platforms.
NHS Digital is also the national custodian of critical health technology infrastructure. We design, build and run one of the most complex messaging networks in the country and deliver outstanding responsiveness, reliability and speed. In October 2018 alone, the NHS Spine handled a record one billion messages, about the same as all of the transactions on all gov.uk services over the whole year. Messaging reliability on the Spine has been constant at 100% for three years and system response times are about 15 times faster than they were in 2014.
We are the custodians of the nation’s patient data and have a statutory duty to maintain and improve its quality, usefulness and safety. We now produce indicators on more than 1,000 different measures of NHS performance, helping leaders plan and manage the NHS’s services more efficiently and effectively, and last year we launched eight new series of statistics on contemporary trends, ranging from appointments in general practice to the mental health of children and young people in England.
Over the past two years, we have doubled the number of data collections and begun delivery of our new Data Processing Services platform which allows us to systematically combine datasets within a single data architecture. These new information streams give medical researchers, small and medium-sized enterprises in healthtech and the life sciences, NHS commissioners and service managers the rich insight they need to continuously improve services and create new possibilities in health and care.
In the coming year, we will focus sharply on implementing the digital ambitions of the NHS Long Term Plan. This vision for health and care in England envisages better use of data and technology in hospitals, in social care, across integrated care settings, through online channels and as tools in the hands of the NHS workforce.
In delivering this agenda, we rely on continuously earning public trust and confidence in our services; we do this by demonstrating transparency, openness and integrity in all we do. We will also invest in nurturing new and stronger partnerships in the NHS family and across our wider ecosystem, including our new partnership with Health Data Research UK in support of the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy and with our new technology partner, NHSX.
