It has come to light today that the House of Commons’ health committee has said poor analytical and planning skills could mean that the aims set out in last summer’s Darzi review are at risk of being missed.

Lord Darzi’s year-long review of the NHS resulted in a blueprint that has the potential to radically transform healthcare delivery over the next decade. This blueprint paves the way for a more person-centred NHS, empowering patients with greater choice, better information and more control over services they receive.

But the group of MPs cast doubt on the ability of local health managers to achieve these goals. They went as far as to describe the quality of management as “striking and depressing”, and arguing that more effort should be made on recruiting and developing better managers.

But there is no reason why current NHS managers cannot meet these demands if they have the correct business intelligence tools. Give clinicians access to good quality data and you give them the ability to lead, and to improve service delivery and healthcare outcomes.

For example, by creating a single repository for all data sources, healthcare managers, clinicians, finance staff and executive directors can all get streamlined access to the information they need to monitor patient progress. This helps to ensure timely access to care as an immediate priority, with the long-term goal of using this information to transform the way healthcare is delivered.

Adopting the approach favoured by Darzi could generate unprecedented improvements in the quality of healthcare delivered by the NHS. But to do so effectively is going to mean intense effort by managers and clinicians. And they are going to need information far beyond what has been available in the past: it is going to have to be far more comprehensive and also far more reliable and this may not be possible without the correct tools.