Last year, we all experienced the overnight transformation of our lives and the way we work wrought by the pandemic. Every organisation felt the pressure, though none more so than the National Health Service. Not just because it was Britain’s frontline fighting force against Covid-19, but because it had to perform its new and urgent mission while still maintaining the great majority of non-Covid healthcare services. All while it was potentially deadly for a doctor and a patient to be in the same room together.
It also turned out that this challenging mission had an unintended consequence: it forced a health service that has long been sclerotic in its approach to new technology to change how it works.
“Things that would have taken a long time suddenly got adopted within the space of weeks,” says Victoria Betton, a digital health consultant and strategist, who points to how overnight many routine consultations and interactions with patients quickly became...