Tags: IDCR

A Huge Digital NHS Push

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medic-563425_1920October 17th, 2016 – Gary Britnell, who leads the work in the NHS for SynApps, has published an article that puts the recent announcements by the Secretary of State for Health at the Health and Social Care Innovation Expo in Manchester in context.

Britnell explains how the speech is our clearest indication yet of what the NHS will look like as the extra £4.2bn the government has allocated to new IT comes on-stream.

These include the 12 first Exemplars, the opening up of official NHS apps, and a major refresh of the main NHS website – but for Trusts, especially any looking to build IDCRs (Integrated Digital Care Records), more pressing might be the demand for, “Instant access to personal health records online” and, “More interactive, local information about the performance of health services [so] patients can see how the performance of their local services has changed over time.”

According to Gary, the message for the NHS IT leader from Manchester is coming through loud and clear: data, and that it’s useless unless it is made interoperable and securely shareable, which is where SynApps’s work on IDCR is going to help, he argues.

To read Gary’s helpful overview go here

Manchester Was The Countdown To A Huge Digital NHS Push – Are You Ready?

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medic-563425_1920Anyone who is part of the UK health IT community gets used to big statements regularly being made about the digitisation of the NHS.

Last month, the Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt spoke at the Health and Social Care Innovation Expo in Manchester, and finally set the seal on what the government expects the NHS to do next.

I probably don’t have to tell you about the context; the 2020 paperless NHS target, the NHS’s Five Year Forward View to ‘harness the information revolution,’ and the findings of the Wachter Review into what needs to be done (see here).

What matters now is what the Secretary specifically announced. (This is the main DoH press release)

The new website will also enable patients to download their personal health records to their phone securely

Hunt confirmed there are three broad themes in the current NHS IT plan, which are a renewed focus on interoperable electronic health records, a call for more use of patient-focused digital technology, and another go at care.data – data harvesting and exploitation of NHS information through secondary use of data, transparency and consent.

These themes matter, as they a) gave specifics on what the government expects the NHS to do with IT reform and b) reset some deadlines, most especially the 2020 paperless target, which has been pushed out to 2023 due to Wachter’s intervention.

Most germane for CCIOs is what NHS England, and more crucially NHS Digital (the old HSCIC), sees as its role in the post-Wachter regime. NHS England lists the following as the most important outcomes of Hunt’s September speech as the Exemplars, the opening up of official NHS apps and a major refresh of the main NHS website: “NHS Choices website will be relaunched as NHS.UK with a wider range of online patient services, including the ability to register with a GP, book appointments, and order and track prescriptions all in one place. The new website will also enable patients to download their personal health records to their phone securely, giving them instant access to important healthcare information, such as prescriptions and test results” (see here).

Now, a lot of this is outside what most Trusts will have to immediately worry about. But there were absolutely some things that will concern them. Consider this:

“Instant access to personal health records online – inspired by the ‘blue button’ app in the US, the new NHS.UK site will also enable patients to securely download their personal health records, giving them instant access to important healthcare information, such as prescriptions and test results.”

and this:

“More interactive, local information about the performance of health services – from today, the MyNHS website will give better data on how NHS services are performing across dementia, diabetes and learning disability services. Maternity, cancer and mental health data will follow later this year. In future, the revamped site will also include maps, graphs and tools so that patients can see how the performance of their local services has changed over time.”

The central role at local level of the IDCR to make this data-driven NHS work

The keyword for the NHS IT leader of today is data.

The Secretary says there is £4bn available now to digitize the NHS along these lines.

That data, however, is useless unless it is made interoperable and securely shareable.

Which is where our attention has been focused, with our work on helping draw up realistic roadmaps for helping health and social care organisations deploy Integrated Digital Care Records (see here).

So to sum up, this is the SynApps view:

Manchester was where the blue touch paper was lit for the next phase of IT innovation in the NHS.

Data is central.

And the IDCR is going to be a key way to deliver against all of this.

I encourage any NHS IT team to get in touch – and let’s see how we can help you make all of this a reality at your local and regional level.

Gary Britnell

SynApps Solutions Healthcare Business

SynApps Collaborates with Alfresco and Enovation to Produce Blueprint for Integrated Digital Care Record

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September 6th, 2016 – SynApps is working with NHS Trusts to open up a practical pathway for health and social care stakeholders to share information – the IDCR (Integrated Digital Care Record).

Working with teams at Alfresco and Enovation, SynApps has developed a blueprint that offers a way for many different data owners to securely and efficiently share data, checking it in and out of a rich central repository.

Find out more about SynApps’ IDCR solutions.

Join us at the NHS Clinical Commissioners Annual Members’ Event

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August 23rd, 2016 – SynApps will be attending the NHS Clinical Commissioners Annual Members’ Event on 3 November 2016 at the Amba Hotel, Marble Arch.

This year the event will look at how CCGs are delivering for local populations with NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens as a keynote speaker. The agenda will focus on the key current issues for CCGs, including the future of commissioning, the ways in which local partnerships and effective resource allocation can support the delivery of the Five Year Forward View and how to make the difficult commissioning decisions locally that will allow this to happen. See here for more details.

If You Too Are Struggling With IDCR – Let’s See If We Can Help

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In the past decade or so, in various forms and to varying degrees of success as we all know, the government has been trying to introduce a more joined-up, computerised NHS. That’s been with the aim of improving efficiency, saving vital budgets, and offering the same kind of easy access and ownership of our medical journeys as we all get in our Amazon, Facebook and TripAdvisor-based daily lives.

There have been various programmes and names for this initiative, be they Care Records, a paperless NHS, EPRs (electronic patient records) and so on. We’ve made a lot of progress, and had some knockbacks (such as care.data). However I think anyone working in or with the NHS agrees that a really promising new push is the IDCR, Integrated Digital Care Records. The idea is to find a way to allow multiple stakeholders in both primary but also acute care and other bodies, especially social care ones, to be able to safely and securely share information about patients both in and out of the surgery and front-line care context.

The 2020 digital NHS agenda

Of course, the IDCR idea is not new. NHS England started talking about this three years ago (see its key ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards’ document , where it discussed the need for a “a fully integrated digital patient record across all care settings by 2018” that could only be achieved “ when NHS providers are connected to the flow of information”. Another key document in the IDCR debate is the NIB (National Information Board’s) Personalised Health and Care 2020 white paper, which, while not mentioning IDCRs specifically, provides the direction of travel here – joined up care, with different stakeholders, in and out of the GP surgery and hospital, able to talk to one another. Plus it explains how that supports the Five Year Forward View agenda, too.

The other thing to flag is that despite IDCR not being especially recent, there hasn’t been a huge amount of progress made delivering against the IDCR agenda. One metric of this is the relative paucity of coverage of it on the main NHS England website; there’s a fantastic success story there, from Bradford and Airedale, which is really inspiring, but we should really be expecting to hear of a few more examples by now.

Wise third parties who monitor NHS progress in digital agree. In a presentation for The Kings Fund, now departed NHS IT supremo Tim Kelsey saw the co-creation of tools and resources to support IDCRs coming on stream last year, while 2020 would see “all local areas” at full local implementation stage.

I think the reality is that the IDCR idea maybe needs a bit of a push to get it going. I think we all know that is unlikely to come from the top of NHS England, which is all about setting strategic direction, and which encourages local, bottom-up thinking by CCGs and Trusts to find affordable, tactical ways of doing things (very much in contrast to the National Programme for IT way of doing things).

If you look out over the current NHS IT landscape, there are some technologies available that can help with IDCR projects. More are coming, and some of which we’re working with, like our partners over at Kainos.

But what a lot of these solutions (apart from Kainos) suffer from is a lack of openness – they are often closed and rigid. That may be changing, but the spirit of IDCR and the 2020 targets is openness and interoperability. It’s hard to see how a siloed package can really push around the wealth of data and data types you need for a good IDCR, like path test results, DICOM format scans, referral notes, social care records and so on.

It’s a lot to ask some software technically, but it’s also a lot to ask software that isn’t totally lined up with all the standards that will need to be at the centre of any convincing IDCR plan, like FHIR, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources and CDA, Clinical Document Standard (CDA).

Time to start your IDCR journey

The honest truth about IDCR in 2016 is that no-one has the silver bullet. But with SynApps’ proven track record in working with multiple data formats, our wide range of Open Source and innovative tech partners, and with our rock-solid commitment to open-ness and interoperability standards, it’s just a fact that our approach stands a better chance of delivering IDCR success than more restricted alternatives.

This is why I’m issuing an open invitation to the NHS community.

We are starting to have really promising early-stage discussions with CCG’s/Trusts who want to open the door marked ‘IDCR,’ but who don’t see how quite yet.

We suspect there are many more CCIOs and Chief Executives in the same position as those we are talking to, with the same problems as you.

Let’s open a dialogue about how an open, standards based, partnership-driven approach, backed by some of the best clinical content management technology on the market, can help you make a truly digital and integrated 2020 not another missed NHS ambition, but a real milestone of progress for you, your patients, and your social and health partners.

I encourage any NHS team to get in touch to discuss their own LDRM (Local Digital Roadmap) or individual strategies on how they’re going to deliver IDCR.

Gary Britnell

See us at two UK health events in November, EHI Live & NHS Clinical Commissioners Annual Members’ Event

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We’ll be attending two major health events in November 2016.

EHI Live is the UK’s number one show for all those involved in digital health, hospital information and healthcare innovation. In November, more than 4,000 professionals dedicated to IT healthcare will attend EHI Live to discuss frontline use of healthcare technology and just what products will shape the future of the healthcare industry and we’ll be there. More on EHI here

NHS Clinical Commissioners Annual Members’ Event is the only independent membership organisation of clinical commissioning groups. The event will focus on the key current issues for CCGs, including the future of commissioning, the ways in which local partnerships and effective resource allocation can support the delivery of the Five Year Forward View and how to make the difficult commissioning decisions locally that will allow this to happen. Find out more here.

More information coming up.  Mark the dates in your diary.  Drop by and meet the SynApps Healthcare team at these two major health events.