Recommendation 15

The NHS Long-Term Plan includes some challenging ambitions for digitising the NHS, including the target that all trusts reach a ’core level of digitisation’ by 2024. However, the NAO found that there was no digital implementation plan which set out how digitally enabled care will be rolled out across the NHS and its plans were underdeveloped. For example, there was no clear schedule for achieving interoperability, which risks making interoperability harder to achieve in the future.25 We asked NHSX how long it expected it to take to achieve interoperability between systems. NHSX was unable to provide a timeframe for achieving complete interoperability, stating that dealing with the enormous legacy of IT systems was an “extremely complex” process and could take “years”. NHS Digital similarly explained that there was no easy way to migrate legacy systems to modern standards, but acknowledged that there needed to be a clear plan for moving away from each legacy system.26