The United Kingdom's NHS is the world's largest public health service, laboring on creaking IT infrastructure. In any sector, that's a ticking time bomb. But when you consider that the NHS has medical records for nearly 67 million people, a breach of that system could be a meltdown. The alarm is being rung from doctors at the Financial Times (paywalled).

"I am at a top London hospital and yet at times I feel as though we are operating in the stone age," one doctor told the FT. For example, doctors email lists of patients to themselves to print out elsewhere. Some 13.5 million working hours estimated to be lost annually due to inadequate IT systems.

On the NHS side, it sounds all broken, but on the tech side, a lot of biz-dev folks must have been rubbing their hands together. The NHS itself works with a long list of suppliers and also began a relationship with Google's DeepMind nearly a decade ago. All of that is only going to get busier: Dozens of companies are building AI-enabled "scribes" to help doctors and other clinicians manage huge volumes of administrative work, and AI is also being applied to drug discovery.

Yes, this FT article is based on subjective experience, and on the surface you might think IT complaints don't feel monumental. But present the same information to malicious hackers, and you never know how it might get used. We just hope the next news cycle won't be about a gigantic data breach.