It would not be surprising if you missed the press release.  Christmas Eve, or the day before, was probably not the best time to share these particular good tidings.  Cynical hacks might be forgiven for assuming this was bad or politically inconvenient news.  It was an EU affirmation of the need for better networking of citizens’ personal ‘eHealth’ data.

Even if you had read the press release you may still have been surprised. Press releases might be popularly supposed to be newsworthy – not something you might have imagined already existed or was blindingly obvious.

The mystery – for whom this ‘news’ was intended – hung in the air throughout Christmas. The answer arrived sideways a few days later via BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme.

The linkage between the accessibility of patients’ personal medical data and a radio debate about the quality of hospital food may not have been immediately obvious but John Hughes, a confident and astute catering manager from Nottingham, hit the nail on the head.  He dismissed as a popular industry myth that it is ‘extremely hard and expensive to run things’. ‘These myths, he said, ‘are propagated by those with a vested interest in not letting you do things yourself.’

His specialist subject may have been hospital catering but John Hughes hit on a wider truth – and one that applies well to both the wider medical profession and public sector network providers.  There are two groups of people who might have been interested reading a press release about better pan-European networking of patient information.  Firstly incumbent telecom providers will have spotted another ‘not letting you do things yourself ’ opportunity.  Secondly the top health service managers will have variously groaned at the obvious need and the even more obvious unlikelihood of being able to afford to make anything happen.

If GP’s and clinicians across Europe had taken any notice they will also have fallen into two groups – those who see no problem because they already have quite adequate systems and networks in place and those for whom such ‘unlikely-to-happen’ aspirations can be safely ignored.

The people who most needed to hear the glad tidings were of course the citizens of 27 European States and particularly those who travel for work or leisure beyond their own borders.

The mere possibility that each person’s medical records might easily be available wherever they happened to be – and in a standard form that is comprehensible in any country without misinterpretation – would be hardly surprising to some but outrageously innovative to others.

Within some countries is it not even possible to transfer medical information between GPs – not because clever transfer systems don’t exist but because many doctors refuse to trust the quality of data in some other doctor’s system; mistrust within a ‘do no harm’ profession that very conveniently keeps their shop closed.

The pressure to change things is never going to emerge from incumbents.  It will only come from citizen dissatisfaction with their current service – and sadly we are a long way from data quality and decent network access being popular topics of conversation amongst tabloid readers.

So why was that EU press release issued on a dead day for news reporting?  Was it written and released simply because someone’s bonus depended on it being done before the year was out?  There is no doubt that technology can provide answers to many things but one thing it cannot do is to cause deep-set minds to change.

As we head toward 2012 the best hope is that technology provides the tools that make it easier for changes to be adopted – but for those changes to happen we need first a recognition that public policy managers and citizens should be allowed to do things themselves rather than put up with poor-value substitutes.

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reference: BBC Radio4 Today programme - 28th December 2011 at 07:55 - Hospital Food