NHS England South West region has issued an early engagement notice for its digital neighbourhoods programme, looking to carry out an “evaluation piece”, asking interested suppliers to complete a questionnaire to help “inform the specification for any potential future opportunity”.
The digital neighbourhoods programme is aimed at enhancing patient and staff experience by “empowering integrated neighbourhood teams with the best use of digital technology and data”, enabling proactive care and preventing unplanned healthcare events.
The aim of the market engagement exercise is to support the NHS England South West region understand the potential outcomes to improve digital usage within the region, support the development of a procurement strategy, and seek informed information and evidence to help understand the capability and capacity of the market to deliver the service as required.
As part of the current programme, an AI-based digital tool called Brave AI is in use, said to help staff to identify vulnerable patients, following a successful pilot in care homes in Somerset which saw falls reduced by 35 percent, ED attendances reduced by 60 percent, and ambulance call-outs reduced by 8.7 percent.
Brave AI will be used to analyse GP data to identify those most at risk of unscheduled hospital admissions in the next 12 months, with those patients then being invited to undertake a “holistic assessment” to develop a personalised care and support plan with the help of integrated neighbourhood teams of health and care professionals.
According to a video published about the programme on the NHS England website, the programme aims to help patients “stay home, happy, and doing what matters to you”.
The closing date for early engagement is set at 11 October, 2024. To learn more about the opportunity, please click here.
Collaboration, models of care and new ways of working
At HTN, we’ve covered a number of stories over the last few weeks with a focus on collaboration, new models of care, and new ways of working.
In July, HTN’s panel discussion on self-management and the future model of community care saw us being joined by experts to chat about the implementation of supported self-care, and the importance of this move toward self-management in enabling preventative care, allowing clinicians to focus on “patients who need us the most”. The panel specifically highlighted remote engagement and monitoring as offering a “really safe and secure way for communication to be happening between clinicians and patients”.
Back in August, we spoke with Louise Croxall, chief nursing information officer for Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust, who shared the trust’s digital priorities, the data work that has led to achievement of HIMSS stage six validation, thoughts on developing a strong digital workforce, and more. Louise identified a “wider opportunity around different organisations working together” around data sharing, adding “I’d like to see more work with data across the community in general”.
Earlier this month, we published some of the comments received from industry experts and leaders across the health sector on the findings of the Darzi report, with missed opportunities for prevention and the need to utilise data and digital tools to enable preventative care and self-management being common themes to be identified by responses.
The latest opportunities in health and care
HTN has also reported on a number of upcoming opportunities for suppliers in the past month, including an opportunity for early engagement from South Central Ambulance Service for an electronic medicines tracking system, to help eliminate paper-based processes, reduce corporate risk, generate cost savings and enhance efficiency.
Barts Health NHS Trust also published a prior information notice highlighting plans to procure a site-wide, real-time system for the monitoring of vital signs at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, offering “comprehensive multi-parameter monitoring” which should include ECG; multiple invasive pressures; non-invasive blood pressure; plethysmography; expired gas analysis; cardiac output; neuromuscular blockade; depth of anaesthesia; and tissue saturations.
Elsewhere, North London Mental Health Partnership shared plans to procure a digital local risk management and incident reporting system; whilst in Wales, Digital Health and Care Wales shared plans to procure a new commercial, off-the-shelf digital maternity solution for NHS Wales, with the functionality to support a shared maternity record and notes and supported by a service management regime.
