The Immunisation Programme — A Lost Opportunity in Proper Digital Citizen Integration in Health?

The Immunisation Programme — A Lost Opportunity in Proper Digital Citizen Integration in Health?

One of my favourite lines in any song is from Eminem:

Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment
Would you capture it, or just let it slip? Yo

I love it because it is so true, and I personally have been lucky to be able to spot some amazing opportunities and let them come alive. And as a society, too, we should spot opportunities that will allow us to build a better and more resilient world.

It’s digital-by-default?

So, I had my vaccination jag this week, and I am very thankful of that. I am in complete wonderment of the amazing science that has gone into the creation of the vaccine and in how great our body’s immune system is. But, I think, the UK has missed an amazing opportunity to rebuild its health care system in a truly digital way. I appreciate that because of the risk to lives, things have got to be done within strict time limits, and within budgets, but I really think that the vaccination of a whole population is the one great opportunity to properly digitally integrate the citizen into our health care system. I may be wrong, but the investment in time and money to create this would have been minimial, but bring so many benefits.

At the current time, I have on-line services for virtually every part of my world. I use Amazon for purchases. I have a banking App for all my purchases. I have logins for virtually everything I do. Virtually everything is now on-line, and not a bit of paper involved. But for my interaction with the NHS, I have almost nothing. For all the years of promising an on-line presence for every citizen in the UK, there is virtually nothing. It is still paper by default, and, if you are lucky, might integrate phone and SMS. My ID is still my date-of-birth, where I live, and my name.

The NHS, itself, has tried to transform itself in the past, but the results have often been poor, and it still struggles with integrating the citizen in a meaningful digital way. While always leading clinically, the NHS has never really produced true leaders in digitization, and still sees the digital integration of the citizen as a bridge too far. Apart from the disastrous Connecting For Health programme, there has never really been a core opportunity to build the digital integration of the citizen at scale, or, probably more important, the incentive for the citizen to actually engage with the digitization programme. But the immunisation programme was a place that the citizen would see great benefits in getting on-line, especially in generating an immunisation passport.

The great opportunity?

To me, the immunisation programme was the great hope to register a digital identity for every citizen, and then use digital methods to record the jag. What’s so difficult about that? Basically, we generate a key pair for every citizen and register the public key against their identity that exists on the NHS database, and then set up a simple online portal for the jag. There is then some way to link the citizen’s ID to the online portal — such as with the excellent Blockpass or Yoti apps — and the details of the appointment can be there, along with the opportunity to link to a mobile App. The citizen would then be incentivised by scanning a QR code (and linking the Yoti App) at the place they receive their jag. After they receive immunisation, a record can be digitally recorded and shown if they have to travel or go to work. It really isn’t that difficult.

Still the same old health care system?

We have always struggled to scale our digital health infrastructure, and this was the one big chance for a citizen to get on-line and get registered in a meaningful digital way. I think most people who are digitally savvy (which is most of us these days), would be happy with the digital interaction, and through Yoti we can register our own email contact details, so that, in future, we can use a digital communication method, rather than using letters in the post and SMS messages.

I am grateful of the NHS, but they, and parts of the public sector, are a long way behind the rest of the world in proper digitization. This was our one great opportunity to really integrate the citizen, and I think we have missed it. We have seen such changes in our world as companies have adapted to digital-by-default, but I worry that the NHS will be left further behind, and the days of letters in the post are not past.

Conclusions

The immunisation programme in the UK has been a great success up to now, but it could have brought so many other benefits for the longer term. For all the money wasted on track-and-trace, and other poor investments, a little bit of funding on the digital integration of the citizen would have really paid off. I fear that an on-line record of immunisation in the UK is a long way off. I appreciate that we still have large parts of the population that will struggle with technology, but we can easily support two modes of interaction (paper/telephone and digital), and make sure everyone can properly keep track of appointments, immunisation, and so on.