Offshoring an "unstoppable force", says NHS IT chief

Offshoring is an "unstoppable force" according to Richard Granger, the director general for NHS IT.

Speaking at the Government UK IT summit in London he said that while the NHS was using some offshore delivery, IT is perhaps not the most interesting type of offshoring possible.

Granger told the conference: "At the moment the line for us is application development. We have a lot of that being done offshore [but] we are not processing personally identifiable data offshore."

He added: "I think it's an unstoppable force."

But he said what is a potentially more interesting form of overseas outsourcing is "your X-rays will be examined by people in other countries at some point in the future". It made little sense to bring doctors to this country when they could be doing the work from another country, he said.

Granger also said the NHS is still suffering from an "information gap" where data is unable to move around.

He said: "Twenty years of computer systems in large parts of the NHS and what we have created, in many cases, is digital filing cabinets. If we could just get more of the information that exists flowing between sites that would be a great help."

He also said the £6.2bn NHS IT project will save lives and improve services: "We will be judged not on our one per cent spend of the NHS budget on IT but on the millions of patients that will get better care because of these enabling technologies being put in place."