EHI Live: Live Blog

 

3:30pm The Evolving Digitally Enabled Patient

Helen Rowntree, head of digital services at NHS England, takes to the stage.

What is a digitally enabled patient?

The first characteristic is they need to have the right digital skills. This is a public health issue - 9m people in this country do not have basic internet skills.

A lot of those people who lack basic internet skills are also going to be the people who have the poorest health. We need to think about how we create and commission simple, easy to use and accessible digital services.

We encourage commissioners to think about internet skills in their local populations.

We want patients to have access to information in the right time at the right place.

Increasingly there is appetite for us to deliver services online, we have made enormous progress with online appointment booking with about one million appointments being made online a month.

We are beginning to see more consultations happening online with GPs using Skype and email and a growth in digital services themselves.

A week ago the first ever entirely digital GP services was launched.

We don't talk about it but there is potential for digital services to network. Social media is a key tool for patients, particularly those with long term conditions. There are some great forums offered by third sector organisations.

People need to be able to control and manage their data and choose who has access to the data. Patients need to be able to feel they can understand their data and respond to it.

There's a huge opportunity to use patients to drive innovation.

Digital enabled patients need digitally enabled clinicians.

We need people not products, we have had a tendency to design products without thinking about what problems they are going to solve.

It's about offering people choice and convenience, it's not about stopping face-to-face services.

At the moment we have a number of different digital services but patients are sometimes confused by what it offer for them so we have a project underway jointly with the Department of Health to bring together digital resources under one site NHS.UK.

That's something we will be taking out and testing over the next couple of months and we will have a vision in the new year.

 

2:00pm The Role of Digital Health in the Integration of Health and Social Care

Tom Denwood, provider support and integration director at the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), takes to the stage.

We are an organisation formed just over a couple of years ago and it felt like we had been given a long list of to-do items.

Over the last 18 months we have replaced NHS Spine with Spine 2, transitioned Secondary Uses Service and Care Identity Service, launched 'My NHS' best on NHS Choices and continued to support the implementation and exit of local systems vix Local Service Provider contracts.

We have also published more than 260 statistical publications and participated in the National Information Board.

By 2020 we will have revolutionised the way technology, data and information are used to transform the delivery of England's health and social care services

There are nine key delivery challenges:

• Making sure there are sufficient skills and market capability
• The right balance between national provision and local support
• Linking the business change to the Five Year Forward View
• The 'Big Data' agenda to find ways to make data appropriately available
• The balance between public provision and market provision, for example EPR delivery
• We need to make sure boards appreciate the part technology can play and leaders are coached
• The right balance between consent versus allowing data to flow
• The online patient proposition - the proposal is for NHS UK to become the single point to access all health and care services to include paying for prescriptions in advance
• Supporting the system to meet its challenges at speed

The HSCIC is here to work with the community, you, everyone, to help transform health and care in England

 

 

12:15pm The Journey to Population Health - Solihull Together for Better Lives Vanguard Site

• Helen Kelly, Director of Solihull Together for Better Lives Programme
• Dr Patrick Brooke, chief officer of Solihull CCG
• Dr Joel Ratnasothy, vice president of Product Strategy at Caradigm EMEA

JR: We need to get to the person before they become a patient, we must change to proactively prevent because prevention is better and cheaper than cure.

The big challenge is how do we measure prevention in the first place?

We have a diseased-based model of healthcare, they are suspected, diagnosed and treated. That's an expensive way to run a system. Data needs to be analysed, diseases predicted and then prevented.

Caradigm is a global company that manages applications that support population health. We are recently undertaking a project with Solihull Together for Better Lives.

PB: In Solihull we have aligned our vision as a combined public sector for stronger communities.

Close to two years ago we started to look at what an integrated system might look like. We were feeling oppressed by NHS England who were being oppressed by the Department of Health, we had the hospital system, relentless targets.

Then it dawned on us if we spent all our time talking about systems at the top we would never move to improve patient healthcare and outcomes.

You have got to understand your population’s needs. We need to be in a place like most of our supermarkets are where they understand their customers.

We need to know they’re in need almost before they know they are in need.

HK: We are on a journey with population and integration and it is ambitious and long term. We are fortunate to have strong commitment.

We have looked at how many people are seen by health and social care, very few are seen by social care only that makes the case for integration very important.

Often people say we don’t need to integrate because what they do is specialist but this is not what the population needs.

For the Solihull Community Wellbeing Service we have reduced non-elective admissions by 1.5%.

There will be urgent care for everyone, Solihull Hospital site will be transformed to create a joined up health and care system.

 

10:15am Digital Primary Care Strategy

Tracey Grainger, head of digital primary care at NHS England, takes to the stage.

What is the digital primary care programme? It's about delivery strategic ambitions in the Five Year Forward View. We want to deliver a paper-free general practice.

Our digital commitments focus on five high impact changes: offering digital services for professionals, offering digital services to the public and patients, achieving excellent data quality, adhering to best practice in Information Governance and adopting core standards for data sharing.

Leaders are expected to become champions of digital enablement

Digital primary care is about creating more efficiency in primary practice - having all records scanned and electronically transferred. Use of e-referrals, to be able to receive digital discharge summaries.

Focus on Prime Minister's GP Access Fund to improve access that has been tested over a third of the country.

We need to create the digital journey, we need to link the patient pathway. We need to embed technology into service delivery.

Technology is just a vehicle for getting the best clinical outcomes.

 

9:30am Harnessing the Information Revolution: supporting health and care services to put data and technology to work for patients, citizens and those who serve them

Tim Kelsey, the national director for patients and information at NHS England, takes to the stage.

There are too many people who have told me the NHS can't do technology, the legacy has been difficult and we have mistakes.

I just want to spend a few minutes reflecting how that is not true anymore and we have made significant strides towards a modern, empowering health service.

In the room, in this exhibition we have people who are doing it and doing it really well.

If we do not have a data rich health service we will not have a sustainable health service

It's a different place we are saying as a national leadership that we want to support local clinical leaders take charge of the agenda for themselves.

At my local hospital in Somerset the new chief executive observed she hires two full time drivers to ferry papers across town. The total cost is £1.5m per annum. If everybody was doing that we might be wasting as much as half a billion on the storage and transport of paper records.

This is not acceptable in a modern health service.

We are at the beginning of a social movement to make the change. And it has been recognised overseas.

There are three components to an empowered health service: transparency, participation and collaboration.

Transparency: my NHS publishes dates on over 36,000 health and care systems. We have plans to publish data at CCG level as well.

I believe where things can be published they should be

We are promoting a radical agenda of meaningful transparency in the health service.

We need patient and public voice. The NHS is at its best when it listens hardest.

Participation: last April this country was the first country to offer online services across the GP estate to citizens in this country.

More than 6.6m people have registered for digital services. Unleashing demand you have to be careful what you wish for but I am delighted patients' voices will force the pace of the health service.

Collaboration: we need to drop old anxieties. We have a symbiotic relationship with our entrepreneurial colleagues.

We must not allow ourselves to fall into the misunderstanding there is a difference of mission between the public and the private sector.

The National Information Board has been described as a committee so large it can be seen from space. But we have made important progress and the consensus between everybody around the table has not been achieved before.

Its first and most important priority is to support you

We are developing a roadmap for the Five Year Forward View, which said harnessing the information revolution was one of the top two priorities for the NHS.

We are in a really important conversation with the government about the degree of capital investment they need to commit to.

We need more analysts, we need an apps revolution.

But this is going to be really difficult. We need to make the benefits case much more clearly, we need to make the case for clinical and human benefit.