The Scottish Government

The eHealth Directorate is headed by Derek Feeley. The eHealth Programme Director is Paul Rhodes.

The eHealth Programme aims to change the way in which information and related technology are used within NHSScotland in order to improve the quality of patient care.

Delivering the eHealth Programme is vital to support the shift from reactive, crisis management, acute-orientated care towards anticipatory, preventative and continuous care.

eHealth supports improvements in service delivery at the level of individual organisations and redesign of processes and roles. This impacts on both clinical and administrative staff and will affect all professional groups.

eHealth aims to improve patient care through advances in technology, resulting in better access to health information, joined-up GP and hospital services and quicker results such as lab tests and x-rays. However, it is not just about technology, it is about modernising processes and encouraging new ways of working.

The eHealth Programme is essentially a 'programme of programmes' and currently consists of numerous programmes, projects and services combined under the eHealth banner. These can be managed either directly by NHS Boards(including NHS National Services Scotland) or by the Scottish Government.

The eHealth Strategy for 2008 -11 focuses on how improvements will be supported as part of the journey towards electronic patient records and electronic communication becoming fully integrated within NHSScotland. There are 4 divisions in eHealth:

• e-Health Programmes
• e-Health Strategy
• e-Health Architecture & Design
• e-Health Change & Benefits

More detailed information on eHealth can be found on the website Scotland's Health on the Web.

Our Goal

Our vision for eHealth is simple: support for the overall NHS Scotland goals as set out in the Better Health Better Care Action Plan. This is about exploiting the power of electronic information to help ensure that patients get the right care, involving the right clinicians, at the right time, to deliver the right outcomes. It is therefore as much about transforming traditional processes as it is about technology.

Objectives

• To enable all Boards to implement a clinical portal incrementally, improving the access to information in support of safer, more efficient and more effective care.
• To establish a Primary and Community care development fund and enable NHS Boards to use it to invest in information support for shifting the balance of care.
• To improve the management of patient journeys, encouraging integration of clinical and management systems to provide more effective, efficient and safer care.
• To improve the governance of investment and particularly the governance of benefits to ensure that decisions are affordable, implementable, usable and acceptable.
• To ensure we have an assurance strategy and information governance policies which support the efficient and effective use of existing and planned systems.