The fact that the NHS is still fundamentally paper based, in 2016, is exactly the kind of problem that leads politicians to want more use of the private sector. In many private industries, even highly regulated ones like finance, the people who first successfully transitioned the industries to computer based systems are now dying of old age. The NHS hasn't even started. In fact it's fair to say that the NHS has shown no ability to fundamentally improve itself. It deploys new medical techniques and drugs (developed in the private sector) but when it comes to changing the organisation or adapting to new business ideas, like computerisation, it has utterly failed.

This is very frustrating for the politicians who are ultimately held accountable for the performance of the NHS. They sit right at the very top and can hardly influence anything - all they can do is set general directions like "use computers for medical records", and then watch helplessly as the incompetent staff below them screw it up, over and over again. Meanwhile they watch as Google or Facebook go on to build self driving cars and global communication networks.

Worse, as students of politics, they know full well what the reason is: the NHS is a classic, communist style top down command-and-control system. Deep institutional rot is exactly what to expect from such an arrangement. Yet they can't change it because the British have an irrational knee jerk reaction to anything that implies people in the private sector can be equally or more competent than people in the public sector.

They started a year ago: http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2015/08/will-nhsuk-be-next-...