Thanks, convener. I welcome the very timely focus of this inquiry as we develop our new digital health and care strategy jointly with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. For many years our health and care system has been underpinned by information technology. There are very few aspects of care that do not involve at some point the use of electronic tools, whether it is to capture patient information for clinical decision making, to enable communication between professionals or to record data for vitally important research, our existing e-health strategies and investment over the years have resulted in every clinical or care professional requiring and using ICT to do their jobs effectively in a modern healthcare setting.
However, very little of what I have just listed is to do with how patients engage with the health service or manage their conditions remotely. In virtually every other industry, digital has transformed the customer experience. In a relatively short time, we have gone from, for example, watching someone else book our holidays at a travel agent to having a vast array of choice and control over what and how we book online. Not only that, thanks to advances in mobile technology, we can do so from the comfort of our own homes or at a time and place convenient to us wherever we may be. The evidence that this committee has received and heard, along with the extensive feedback that we have received through our own engagement, suggests a growing expectation for the same sort of flexibility, choice and control in health and social care, underpinned by effective core infrastructure across Scotland.
It is with that in mind that we shaped our draft vision for the new digital health and social care strategy around the individual, and I am pleased that it has been well received by your correspondents. Previous e-health strategies largely delivered the infrastructure that was required to deliver safe and effective care within the national health service, but our new strategy is shaping up to develop and deliver the infrastructure, tools and products that will now be required to underpin the radical transformation across health and social care that this Parliament has supported. Our new focus on digital health and care in the round will lead to greater information sharing across health and social care. It will enable people to take greater care of their health and wellbeing. It will lead to the shifting of the balance of care out of hospital and into the community and it will lead to greater remote working for staff and remote access to services for the patients.
Fundamentally, our new strategy will equip our health and care services with the tools that are needed to deliver a transformation into 21st century place-based care. In doing so, it will build on the excellent work that has been progressed over the past decade. We have successively rolled out mainstream telecare within social care. The emergency care summary provides a vital electronic summary of everyone’s general practitioner records for out-of-hours care across Scotland. The number of remote interactions that are handled by NHS 24 continues to grow every year. Every secondary clinician in the west of Scotland can access a single clinical portal, and there are excellent examples of clinical portals everywhere in Scotland. Some services are routinely delivered via videoconferencing, including vital lifesaving stroke thrombolysis delivered over the national VC network. Primary care records are now entirely digital and we are well on our way to digitising all secondary care records. We have established a number of innovation centres, including one with a specific focus on digital health and care. Almost all referrals for primary care are electronic. Our renal and Scottish care information—diabetes collaboration project systems are recognised as world leading and we are starting to develop scalable approaches to remote monitoring and remote management of long-term conditions. We have an NHS-wide email system allowing for instant communication across staff teams.
That goes some way in highlighting the scale of what has been achieved over the past decade. Those are all essential systems and approaches that require continued development in use. It also provides an indication of the scale of the challenge that we face in shifting our focus and tools for our citizens. Furthermore, as the WannaCry ransomware attack highlighted, the sheer volume of devices and systems that are now connected to the internet presents a challenge in and of itself. Our new strategy has to balance the need for continually innovating and developing approaches to the delivery of care with the pressing safety issue of ensuring that our existing infrastructure remains secure and fit for purpose. In order to achieve that, we will set out an implementation plan and an infrastructure plan to accompany our strategy.
Finally, there are some good global exemplars of some of the individual digital solutions that are in use, including here in Scotland and in countries such as Finland and Estonia, which the committee has heard about. Every healthcare institution in the world now needs to manage the change in emphasis from a 1990s IT-focused approach to a 2020s digital citizen-focused approach. I look forward to discussing that with you in more detail.