Those in the health IT industry who have been around the blocks a few times will have raised an eyebrow at UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt’s speech [political content removed] this week ushering in his second and last budget before the election, and probably his last budget full stop.

Mr Hunt insisted on taking a positive view of the state of the UK’s economy and an even rosier view of the potential of IT to radically transform productivity in the public sector, including the quite remarkable claim that investing £3.4 billion to modernise NHS IT systems would help unlock £35 billion in public sector productivity savings.

Remarkable, or ludicrous? Considering Mr Hunt himself has been around the blocks with us old stagers and that he well remembers the trials and tribulations of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the NHS (proposed cost £9.8b, proposed benefits £10.7b, actual cost £11.4b, actual benefits N/A) as well as his own time as health secretary. Back then, he was boasting that investment in IT could deliver a “paperless NHS” by 2018 and unleash an admittedly far more modest £4b in savings.

The NHS is still not paperless, the plan to have each trust using an electronic patient record by 2018 has still not eventuated – it was pushed back to 90 per cent by 2023 by one of Mr Hunt’s treasury predecessors, and then to 2025, and then to March 2026 – and GP records are as siloed as ever.

Mr Hunt, nevertheless, is persisting. “Making changes on the scale we need is not cheap,” he opined. “The investment needed to modernise NHS IT systems so they are as good as the best in the world costs £3.4bn. But it helps unlock £35bn of savings, ten times that amount.

“We will slash the 13 million hours lost by doctors and nurses every year to outdated IT systems. We will use AI to cut down and potentially cut in half form filling by doctors. We will digitise operating theatre processes allowing the same number of consultants to do an extra 200,000 operations a year.

“And as a result of this funding, all hospitals will use electronic patient records, making the NHS the largest digitally integrated healthcare system in the world.”

The extra funds are in addition to the £330m the NHS is shelling out to Palantir and Accenture for the Federated Data Platform (FDP), which has caused as much consternation as the old care.data project did, even though GP records are not yet in scope.

Pretty sure we have heard this before, and not just from the Brits. $A11.5b in benefits over 15 years is a figure still ringing in our ears and we sincerely doubt that has come to fruition, and while no one has been silly enough to put a price on the ROI for its $NZ400m investment in Hira over the ditch, there are still doubters out there that they’ll see much benefit at all.

We took a look at New Zealand’s plans last week and got a pretty big reaction. Our poll questions asked whether Te Whatu Ora’s remedy for digital health on the money. This was reasonably close: 61 per cent said yes, but 39 per cent said no. We also asked if you voted yes, what should it prioritise? If no, how else can it be fixed? Here’s what you said.

Elsewhere this week, our top story was on the good progress reported in a webinar by the Sparked FHIR accelerator, which has gone back to the basics to develop a “core of the core” of common data elements for interoperable health information exchange.

Sparked is thankfully nice and transparent about what it is up to and is inviting the whole community to get involved, but by heavens it can be difficult to understand exactly what is going on considering the almost impenetrable jargon that invariably accompanies discussions about standards. We were most pleased to see former AMA vice president Chris Moy whip out his PowerPoint to help make sense of it all during the webinar.

Next up for FHIR standards is a full-day symposium being jointly held by HL7 Australia and HL7 New Zealand on March 20, followed by connectathons in each country. It doesn’t seem to be set up for anyone to watch online, which is a shame.

Meanwhile, over to Tasmania, which is in the throes of an election to decide the fate of the island state (and most importantly, its AFL team). Healthcare is of course a pivotal issue for voters and is high on the agenda, and this week the election debate was rocked by a couple of big policy announcements, the biggest of which was by Health Minister Guy Barnett that he had a Strong Plan on hospital IT, promising to phase out the aged hospital TVs that patients have to shell out for. Hospital tellies are a big deal at election time, although not in the same league as hospital car parking of course.

That brings us to our poll question for the week:

Is the new funding for NHS IT likely to achieve the stated goals?

Vote here, and leave your comments below.