Digital Health Takeaways from the BCS Faculty of Health and Care Annual Meeting

Notes from the BCS Faculty of Health and Care Annual Meeting, where the sessions kept circling back to one underlying question: not whether NHS data and AI systems can be digitized, but whether what’s been digitized can actually be trusted.

ePRaSE and Prescribing Safety

Procuring an electronic prescribing system is not the same as making it safe — local configuration is what actually determines patient safety in practice. ePRaSE tests these configurations across 107 trusts using 45 fictional patient scenarios, and the headline finding is fragmentation: prescribing safety has to be re-solved, trust by trust, across nearly 20 different platforms (Epic, Cerner, System C, TPP SystmOne among them).

CogStack and Unstructured Data

Roughly 80% of healthcare data is unstructured — sitting in free-text clinical notes, PDFs, scanned letters, and imaging reports. CogStack applies natural language processing to extract clinical concepts from that unstructured text, turning previously unsearchable data into something usable for operations, finance, and clinical care alike.

AI Governance Gaps

Traditional NHS safety frameworks like DCB0129 and DCB0160 were not built for AI systems, and it shows. AI introduces new failure modes — bias, explainability gaps, performance drift — that these frameworks don’t cover. The relevant standards catching up to this include ISO/IEC 42001, BS 30440, ISO/IEC 23894, and the EU AI Act.

Cybersecurity as an Ongoing Discipline

Recent NHS incidents — the Synnovis ransomware attack, ambulance service breaches, cyber-linked patient deaths — are a reminder that security isn’t a box to check annually. It requires a repeating cyber culture cycle, not a compliance certificate.

Core Lesson

Digital health problems can’t be solved by technology alone. They demand organizational literacy, configuration discipline, and shared accountability across clinical, technical, and management teams.

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