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Harry Pyant, healthcare enterprise lead at Telehouse, explains that going paperless is an important step for healthcare, but it is only part of the wider digital challenge.
The drive to remove paper from the NHS has been running for more than two decades, but paper records remain firmly embedded in many parts of healthcare. In fact, as many as four-fifths of NHS trusts continue to use pen and paper for record-keeping, according to recent research by the BMJ.
In addition, analysis by The King’s Fund found that the NHS spent nearly £240m storing patient records in 2024/25, with a significant proportion of this expenditure likely to have been associated with paper records. There are often significant financial implications that come with continued offline storage, and it’s also not an exclusive challenge to the public sector. Private healthcare organisations are often battling a mountain of paperwork too.
There is important and valuable work to be done to transition away from files and folders, but becoming paperless should not be the ultimate measure of digital progress in healthcare. Converting information from a physical record into a digital one only offers the right value if clinicians can access the right information securely and at the right time.
Healthcare organisations must therefore ask themselves the question: is their digital infrastructure improving continuity, secure access, and availability at the point of care, thereby enabling better and safer patient care?
Reliable information at the point of care
Patient records hold a different significance to many other forms of organisational data. Potentially life-changing decisions can be made by clinicians based on the information they have to hand. Records must therefore be accurate and current, but also available when needed.
As healthcare becomes increasingly dependent on digital systems, the consequences of downtime can extend far beyond an IT inconvenience. If access to a system is interrupted, clinicians could be left unable to view patient records, medical images, or other information they need to make timely decisions and maintain continuity of care.
Digitisation has the potential to make data far easier to access and share. Rather than searching for different physical files, healthcare professionals can access data sources from different healthcare settings. If systems work together and data is made accessible, this can enable a clear and comprehensive view of a patient’s history.
Achieving that all-encompassing view, however, depends on a resilient infrastructure environment behind it, particularly as healthcare becomes more data-intensive. For example, medical imaging creates substantial storage requirements. High-resolution scans and digital pathology files add to the volume of information that must be retained and accessed. At the same time, the growing use of cloud services and AI-led diagnostics is increasing demand for compute capacity, high-performance storage, and fast, reliable access to large datasets.
These pressures extend across the healthcare sector. Private hospitals, specialist clinics, and other providers also need to consider how they store and access growing volumes of clinical data, without continually expanding the physical IT infrastructure they maintain on-site.
Healthcare organisations are also frequently using digital infrastructure indirectly through partners and providers, creating a growing chain of dependencies that all need to function correctly if digital healthcare is to operate as intended.
A network outage, for example, could have consequences across multiple healthcare systems. Clinicians may be unable to retrieve patient records or diagnostic images, appointments and procedures may be delayed, and information may no longer flow reliably between hospitals and other care providers. This makes the resilience, connectivity and availability of the infrastructure supporting these interconnected services critical to maintaining continuity of care.
Maintaining patient trust
Technical resilience is just one part of the challenge. Healthcare digitisation hinges on people trusting organisations with some of their most personal information. This places security and governance at the heart of infrastructure decisions.
Organisations need to know exactly where sensitive information is held and who has the authority to access it. They also need clear auditability, including visibility over who has accessed data and how information moves between different systems.
Compliance with requirements such as UK GDPR needs to remain equally clear, particularly as data travels between applications, cloud platforms, healthcare organisations, and technology partners. These considerations can understandably make digital transformation more complex, as healthcare providers need confidence that digitisation will not introduce new compliance, security, or data protection risks.
Data sovereignty is also top-of-mind as data moves into the online space. Greater use of cloud services and third-party platforms can make the underlying location and movement of information less obvious. Healthcare organisations therefore need confidence in the infrastructure that providers and technology partners offer.
Building the foundations for dependable digital healthcare
As more patient information moves online, healthcare organisations become increasingly dependent on the infrastructure supporting it. Resilience therefore needs to be built into digital transformation from the outset, rather than assumed to follow from digitisation. Data centres have an important role to play, providing the resilient, secure, and highly connected infrastructure needed. Colocation, which involves hosting IT systems and data in a specialist third-party data centre, can offer healthcare organisations and their technology partners access to environments for hosting critical systems and large volumes of data.
It’s important to evaluate where high-volume workloads should be located based on resilience, needed capacity, required performance, and level of governance. The most data-heavy resources, such as medical images, are often better suited to resilient off-site storage where capacity can be expanded as requirements grow. Healthcare providers then gain back valuable space by reducing the amount of physical IT infrastructure to be housed on-site.
Reliable connectivity is equally important to enable different systems to communicate with one another. The connections between cloud platforms, software providers, diagnostic services, other healthcare organisations, or systems holding patient records need to be fast, secure, and reliable.
Having access to multiple network providers can create alternative connectivity routes if one connection is interrupted, helping to reduce single points of failure and maintain service continuity. This is so important as recent in-house research reveals that 78% of private healthcare organisations report shortcomings in their business continuity planning, ranging from incomplete coverage of digital dependencies to inconsistent documentation or infrequent testing.
Much of this same principle applies to cloud computing. Where multi-cloud environments are run – a mixture of IT systems and services hosted in public clouds such as AWS and Microsoft Azure – it often makes the most sense to have flexibility about where different types of data and applications are best located.
With this flexibility, sensitive information can be stored and processed under tighter controls to meet regulatory, governance, or sovereignty requirements, while other applications can benefit from the scale and flexibility of the cloud.
As healthcare makes greater use of digital records, while emerging innovations such as AI-led diagnostics and telemedicine become more prominent and place greater demands on digital infrastructure, the capabilities of that infrastructure are only going to become more important in the coming years.
The real measure of progress
Going paperless is an important step for healthcare, but it is only part of the wider digital challenge. The real measure of progress is whether healthcare professionals can access accurate information securely and reliably whenever they need it. This will depend on having the right infrastructure sitting behind digital services.
Resilient data centres and secure, scalable storage can help healthcare organisations keep critical systems available and protect sensitive patient information. Reliable connectivity and flexible access to cloud platforms also make it easier to adapt as technology evolves. Together, these foundations can support more dependable digital healthcare and better patient outcomes.
