Content by Open Medical.
For the NHS to achieve its Long Term Plan, it needs to move from silos to system working, from reactive to proactive care. But how? By establishing an integrated digital ecosystem.
A digital ecosystem will drive the reduction of health inequalities and provide targeted, personalised, and preventative care, as well as fuel the transition to population health management. The future of healthcare lies within a digital ecosystem.
The NHS is implementing more and more digital health technologies, gradually creating such an ecosystem. However, within all of this technological progress, one critical aspect cannot be overlooked—the heartbeat of digital ecosystems: data.
Not just any data
Ecosystems in the natural world rely on soil to support the lives of plants and animals. Similarly, data serves as the soil within healthcare’s digital ecosystem, allowing healthcare to cultivate robust care services. Data in healthcare serves as fertile ground, empowering well-informed decisions, predicting health issues early, tailoring precise treatments, and enabling community-wide preventive initiatives. Moreover, it acts as a catalyst, fuelling AI, novel therapies, and service improvements.
However, just like in nature, the ecosystem’s success relies on the quality of its soil. If the soil is devoid of nutrients, the whole ecosystem suffers. In healthcare, decisions are only as good as the data they’re based on. So, it’s not just about having data; it’s about having high-quality data.
A blurry image
Consider the Fracture Liaison Service (FLS); it aims to identify patients at-risk of osteoporotic fragility fractures. Without comprehensive data, finding at-risk patients becomes nearly impossible. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack, except you don’t even know what the needle looks like. And so, many individuals go unidentified and fall, which increases the risk of subsequent fractures. These fragility fractures not only cost the NHS billions of pounds every year but also drastically diminish patients’ quality of life.
It is only when the data collected is granular that healthcare can reap the benefits, like taking preventative actions such as identifying and treating patients at risk of fragility fractures before the condition escalates. Therefore, the coding language employed by digital health solutions must be capable of capturing data that effectively reflects the complexities of health circumstances.
Quality over quantity
At Open Medical, our digital solutions employ SNOMED CT (Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms), a coding language that is widely used in 48 countries around the world. By guaranteeing the depth and accuracy of data, SNOMED CT empowers our users to confidently make precise, data-driven decisions.
Take, for instance, our trauma and orthopaedic (T&O) management platform. As clinicians use the system to manage their clinical workflow, it simultaneously captures detailed data from all patients entering the T&O department. When used in conjunction with our Pathpoint FLS system, Pathpoint FLS can automatically flag patients at risk of fragility fractures based on specific triggers and provide management tools for further support. This has had tremendous impact; for example, within just a month of using Pathpoint FLS, one care organisation was able to identify as many patients as they had in the preceding year. These patients, who may have previously gone unnoticed, are now receiving life-changing care, keeping them from potentially disastrous falls that would have robbed them of their autonomy.
