In 2012, the NHS Future Forum published a report declaring that the health service was stuck in the ‘information dark ages’. Twelve years later, at the start of 2024, IT and network outages impacting hospitals in Southern England hit the headlines, once again spotlighting the significant impact legacy technology can have on patient care.
The healthcare industry’s reliance on legacy technology is an aged problem that continues to grow. With stretched budgets constraining healthcare organisations across the board, IT leaders’ ability to deal with incidents has been compromised, resulting in rising numbers of outages. Ultimately, this has a knock-on effect on their ability to innovate in the pursuit of better patient care.
LogicMonitor’s recent Future Further report laid bare the unfortunate situation health services currently find themselves in, with 58% of healthcare IT leaders listing budget cuts as a major consideration impacting cloud migrations.
The report also highlights that almost two-thirds of IT leaders are spending more time troubleshooting and firefighting incidents stemming from legacy technology than being proactive and driving innovation. Patients are suffering because of this, with 36% of teams having to put off initiatives to improve patient satisfaction in order to respond to IT issues.
So how exactly can the healthcare industry overcome the problems associated with legacy technology and begin to focus again on improving the patient experience?
Optimisation first, transformation later
Healthcare systems based on legacy technology are slower and more prone to error. They also make it more difficult for IT teams to assess the health of mission critical systems, meaning they can’t take proactive steps to address issues before they spiral into crises.
The knock-on effect is that almost half of IT professionals are spending more than 20% of their working weeks troubleshooting. This isn’t just a headache for tech teams – the inability to prevent IT outages contributes to skyrocketing patient waiting times as well as costly maintenance.
Given that so many NHS health trusts and boards are operating with limited budgets, the way to overcome these problems lies in optimising existing tech stacks, rather than investing in complete, transformational overhauls.
Visibility of mission-critical data is central to effective optimisation, so the healthcare industry needs to leverage tools that help to break down data silos, integrating and unifying IT infrastructures and illuminating what needs to be seen, when it is needed.
That includes data about the health and performance of back-end and in-hospital systems like CT and MRI scanners, but it also involves data from the ever-increasing number of patient wearables and other healthtech devices. These devices – including smart watches, remote healthcare apps, at-home blood pressure monitors and more – have helped to make healthcare more accessible.
A key benefit of this has been the emergence of virtual wards, with patients being able to access care from the comfort of their home, or a care home. With spaces in hospital beds at a premium, the rise of this practice will alleviate pressure on NHS, whilst enabling the patient to live a more comfortable life whilst receiving care for long term illnesses.
However, these devices have also contributed to the explosion of data produced across healthcare ecosystems, creating another issue for IT teams to manage. To combat this, healthcare organisations must invest in data-led technologies – such as AI-powered observability tools – to gain a full, 360-degree view of both patient data and IT infrastructure more broadly.
The benefits of doing so are twofold: patients will get the right care in a timely manner, and IT professionals will have greater visibility over system health and performance enabling proactivity and ensuring quicker uptime. The result is fewer outages and better patient outcomes.
Automation is another technology available in observability solutions that healthcare organisations can make use of to reduce outages. Automated system monitoring helps reduce the time between alert and analysis, which can help IT teams become more proactive in addressing issues related to mission-critical systems.
Less disparate data, more single-glance insights
The digital transformation of healthcare has been ongoing for several years, but there is still work to do. For the NHS to run more efficiently and for the patient experience to improve once more, system performance must be visible in real time and IT incidents should be flagged rapidly. These efficiencies will prompt teams to take action before incidents snowball into full-blown outages. Additionally, the data from disparate sources such as smart watches, blood pressure monitors and other healthtech devices should be readily available to healthcare providers so that they can make the best possible decisions about treatment and care.
These might feel like distinct challenges, but they boil down to the need to make data more observable, and the need to apply advanced technology like AI and automation to enhance the overall monitoring of systems. To ready themselves for the future, health organisations need access to tools that will give them quick visibility of and insights about these data-points, ultimately helping to drive forward the way patient care is delivered.
By Jordan Amos, NHS Specialist at LogicMonitor