First up, let’s take a look at the digital strategy for Hertfordshire and West Essex ICS.
HTN covered it in January this year; the document focuses on supporting ICS transformation initiatives with ICS-wide solutions that remain consistent with place needs; making a measurable difference to collective health and care provision across the footprint through common approaches to digital technology; improving the commonality of digital solutions and their interoperability; driving up digital maturity in line with What Good Likes Like; and securing the best value for the ICS through digital investments.
The ICS’s goals are to maximise opportunities through coordination and multi-disciplinary approaches; to bring together essential connectivity, information, intelligence and data for all care settings, and to use technology to keep people well in their homes, addressing the challenges of demand and capacity in doing so. The ICS says that it will “encourage targeted investment and digital innovation at the front line that has potential scaleable benefits to improving health and care outcomes.” There are plans to work with Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs), universities, and the private sector where possible to further digital work, and focus is also placed upon improving inclusion, both by supporting the population to make the most of digital means to access healthcare and by building a digitally skilled workforce.
In order to achieve these aims, Hertfordshire and Essex share a number of strategic principles around which this work will be built. Firstly, around investment, they pledge to prioritise the things that residents and staff actually need; to get the best out of digital suppliers; to set clear and realistic goals; and to invest in a dedicated, cross-functional ICS team. Secondly, looking at delivery, the ICS is to “think long-term, deliver in the short-term”; to embed a culture of testing, measuring and learning; to support change where necessary, with “rigorous delivery assurance against business cases and outcomes”; and to build trust in digital, by addressing inclusion and exclusion explicitly, adopting a clear and structured benefits realisation framework; and investing as necessary in education and training.
There has been plenty of digital-focused news coming out of the ICS recently. In the last two weeks alone, we’ve seen two big news stories – firstly, the the ICB awarded a three-year contract to implement a digital mental health service for children and young people in the region, which will provide seven-day access to online professional counsellors, forums, self-help materials and more.
Elsewhere, the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAHT) awarded a £28 million contract to implement the Cerner electronic patient record system in a 10-year deal set to run until February 2023, as part of the trust’s ambitions to become “one of the most technologically advanced in the country”.
We asked Jeffrey Wood, deputy director of ICT at PAHT, for his thoughts on the digital direction of his trust and wider ICS. He says: “The ICS provides a number of shared services, not least of which is the procurement team which allows us to co-ordinate spend and projects to get the best for the individual organisations and ultimately the best for our residents. We are also working with our ICS colleagues on other shared initiatives such as security and pathology.
“PAHT’s 2030 vision is to be a modern, integrated and outstanding trust with one of our key priorities being digital health, through which we will harness new technology and digital solutions to transform patient care and improve how we work. Our patients are at the heart of our strategy, and we will provide them with the best care and outcomes.”
Jeffrey describes some work that the trust has done around customer journey mapping, illustrating different patient journeys. “It is these illustrative journeys together with our clinical digital senate, patient panel and various boards that allow us to ensure our strategic direction needs the needs of our end users whether this be patients, residents or personnel,” Jeffrey continues. “To undertake this extensive piece of work we have actively been renewing our infrastructure and resilience including moving to cloud telephony, as well as deploying WiFi6 and a 4G Distributed Antenna Systems with a 5G Private network.
“Our Unified Communications programme is almost complete and allows us to remove our bleeps and pagers. This in itself has had many dependencies – ensuring the right equipment is with the right person, ‘choose your own device’, corporately-owned personally-enabled devices, PC-as-a-service, multi-carrier sim cards, device charging for visitors, patients and staff, and moving our desktop-based devices to a more mobile basis. It also feeds perfectly into our newly-procured EHR system. Alongside our integration engines and robotic process automation work, it will ultimately give back valuable time to our clinicians to enable them to spend more time with patients.”
The trust will undertake many proof-of-concepts in the next few years to assess the viability of technologies, Jeffrey adds, such as real-time location services, holographic virtual assistants, virtual ward rounds and training using HoloLens.
“We always keep our core values of keeping the patient at the heart of things, creative collaboration and everyday excellence foremost in our minds,” he says. “It’s vital to recognise that technology is just a small part of the story to achieve true digital transformation.”
