DURING the second sitting of the new States Assembly last Monday, Health Minister Senator Tom Binet said progress was underway to bring the department’s technological infrastructure “out of the Dickensian era and into the 21st century”.
One of the people responsible for the herculean task of reimagining the Island’s sprawling and diffuse health systems is Martin Carpenter, director of health and informatics at Health and Care Jersey.
Mr Carpenter – formerly the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at NHS Kent and Medway ICB – arrived to the role having gained significant experience across the UK’s health and social housing sectors.
In December 2025, as part of the States Assembly approved budget, he secured approval for £7.9 million per annum to deliver his flagship project: a single patient record delivered via the open source OpenEHR platform.
In his first sit-down interview since taking on the job in October 2024, Mr Carpenter told the JEP that – when it comes to digital health – “two things” remain “really lacking” in Jersey when compared with the UK.
“One is how information is moved between different care providers in a structured, coordinated way,” he explained, adding that the second is Jersey “having a single view of everything to do with an Islander’s health and care record.”
“And if you’ve got that in one place, then health and care professionals are in a better place to deliver the best possible intervention at that time”, he said.
Speaking at his office, nestled away on the site of the General Hospital, he noted that critical information about patients in Jersey is generally handled “in a very unstructured way”.
“It’s a really poor Islander experience,” he added. “Because every time you go and see somebody, you’re having to repeat yourself, and that’s really inefficient as well.”
“People are really frustrated at the level of administration, and repetition, and duplication that you have to do by moving from one person to another – and that also increases patient safety risks”, he added.
Mr Carpenter offered the example of a domiciliary care provider asked to help someone discharged from hospital without having the appropriate information to hand.
“You can imagine that actually it shouldn’t be, in that situation, a guessing game about what you’re here to do – it should be really clear instructions”, he reflected.
A shared patient record, he argued, will be especially important in the context of a healthcare system increasingly under strain due to Jersey’s ageing population.
“We recognise that this train is coming towards us, in terms of healthcare is not going to be sustainable.
“[So] when we build our shared care record, and our single patient record, it’s really important that we do that from the perspective of taking Islanders with us on that journey – and we do that in a really transparent and open way.
“So one of the things that we’ve been doing over the last year and a half is working out exactly how we do that, and how we it within the context of existing Jersey data protection law.”
Mr Carpenter believes that by using OpenEHR – a technology already in use across Estonia, Slovenia, Norway, Catalonia and London – to establish a shared patient record, Jersey avoid being “locked into a proprietary system” susceptible to becoming quickly outmoded.
“My experience of the UK is that every 10-to-15 years people get a little bit unhappy with the systems that they have, and then go through this roller-coaster of rip and replace, which costs a lot of money.
“We’re going to avoid that by having a standard database that’s existing, and then we’ll say that we want applications to be able to access that data.
“So it’s going to be more efficient for us, but it will also give us that whole-person view around what is happening.”
He spoke of wanting to shift strategy across healthcare from “a big bang approach” to “small, iterative, incremental steps” more in line with “rapidly” changing digital technology.
“One of the challenges that we have is having a kind of British mentality about stuff, which is being really focused on making sure you don’t fail – which is sometimes a lot of governance.
“[This is] opposed to the American way of thinking, which is, ‘how do I make you succeed? What do you need? How do I get you from A to B as soon as possible with the highest quality?’”
“I would like to see everything in place tomorrow,” he added. “I think everybody would like to see this in place tomorrow – so there is a kind of impatience that exists.
“[But] we know we have do that in a way that isn’t going to compromise on patient safety on the Island.”
“What we don’t want to do is impose technology on people,” he surmised. “Rather than we’re going to deliver technology at you, we’re going to deliver outcomes in conjunction with you.”
