At first glance the title of this piece may sound counter-intuitive to some readers. After all, there have been phenomenal advances seen in healthcare over the last two decades. Advances in diagnostic processes and treatments have given us state of the art scanners and robotic surgery. The development of new drug therapies have enabled physicians to substantially extend life, and sometimes even offer cure, to those with previously terminal diagnoses. So surely everything is ticking along nicely in the land of healthcare innovation?

The fast data set revolution is being created by you. Every time we text, search, travel or buy we add to the data mountain of some 2.5 billion gigabytes a day that humanity is collectively writing, bringing a new consciousness into existence.

Tony Speakman (pictured), Regional Director at FileMaker International, shares why The National Health Service (NHS) is now ripe for digital innovation.

An exciting start-up in Cornwall called DiSC has developed the “Living Memories” series, an archive film based memory trigger resource on DVD for use with older people, particularly those with dementia.

When I first began work as a management consultant, I wanted to avoid NHS projects at all costs. Bureaucracy, inefficiency, unmotivated people, frustration were some of the words that would cloud my judgement when looking at the list of projects available.

John Stuart Mill writing in On Liberty in 1859 said “man (humanity) is not built like a machine, that should be set to do the work exactly proscribed to him but should be seen more like a tree, that can grow on all sides depending on the inward forces that make it a living thing”.