Digital Healthcare – Making The Most Of NHS IPR

I’ve got what I think is an important question for NHS England.

How do we get the best value out of the IPR (intellectual property rights) created by NHS organisations developing digital tools – Is it by freely sharing this IPR or by seeking to exploit it commercially?

Encouraging innovation, and more importantly getting it adopted across the NHS, is rightly a high priority for NHS England another is the digitisation of the NHS and in regard to the later NHS England has been a welcome and powerful advocate of transparency, participation, open data, open systems and open source.

However, as is often the case with the NHS there appears to be a lack of common purpose across the organisation and a failure to align incentives with these objects, indeed there are incentives in place that seem to be designed to discourage them.