5.28. Digital technology can support the NHS to deliver high quality specialist care more efficiently. Early examples of what will be a much more profound shift include:

• By 2021, pathology networks will mean quicker test turnaround times, improved access to more complex tests and better career opportunities for healthcare scientists at less overall cost. Mandated open standards in procurement will ensure that these networks are ready to exploit the opportunities afforded by AI, such as image triage, which will help clinical staff to prioritise their work more effectively, or identify opportunities for process improvement;
• By 2023, diagnostic imaging networks will enable the rapid transfer of clinical images from care settings close to the patient to the relevant specialist clinician to interpret. This open standards-based infrastructure will enable both the rapid adoption of new assistive technologies to support improved and timely image reporting, as well as the development of large clinical data banks to fuel research and innovation.

5.29. Decision support and artificial intelligence are developing all the time. These technologies need to be embraced by the NHS, but also subjected to the same scrutiny that we would apply to any other medical technology. In the coming years AI will make it possible for many tasks to be automated, quality to increase and staff to focus on the complexity of human interactions that technology will never master.

5.30. We have seen that the NHS is a potential target for cyber criminals. We will ensure NHS systems and data are secure through the implementation of security and monitoring systems across the whole estate, the education of all staff, and the design of systems and services to be resilient and recoverable. We will mandate and continually update cyber security standards and behaviours for our systems and staff.

5.31. To achieve these digital advances, we need to create the right environment and infrastructure for innovation to thrive by:

• creating a secure and capable digitally literate workforce;
• requiring every technology supplier to the NHS to comply with published open standards to enable interoperability and continual improvement;
• making solutions that are commissioned and developed by the NHS available as ‘open source’ to the developer community so that they can build on and enhance them to meet the evolving needs of the NHS and our patients;
• ensuring that LHCR data platforms provide open and free APIs for developers to create new solutions that can compete with and, where appropriate, replace the traditional solutions used by the NHS;
• making available a set of central capabilities that are rapidly deployable and can be used as the basis for future local innovation and development, such as the NHS Login or the national record locator service.