31.03.17
People power in technology
Source: NHE Mar/Apr 17
Anne Cooper, deputy clinical director and chief nurse at NHS Digital, discusses the importance of clinical involvement in health digitisation.
When Professor Robert Wachter published his review in 2016, there was a lot of focus on areas such as the global digital exemplars, but one of the key themes running through the review was more overlooked in the reporting. That theme was the importance of clinical involvement in the delivery of digitisation in health and care.
This is something I believe in passionately, and at NHS Digital we are working in a number of areas to ensure that our systems are designed, delivered and improved not only with the clinician in mind, but with them by our side every step of the way.
True digitisation of the NHS will not be delivered through technology alone. We have great developers and designers who can deliver big tech, but what we need is to win hearts and minds. We will do this by co-producing solutions which act as an enabler to great care.
We need to put things in place that make the lives of patients better, improve their experience of care, make the work of the NHS smoother, more efficient and improve outcomes. Our systems need to be intuitive, fast and really add value if we are going to encourage usage and deliver real benefit.
New regional teams
We cannot do any of this as an ivory tower organisation, and we can’t successfully engage with the entire NHS from our offices. It’s time to take the NHS Digital show on the road.
As well as ensuring we have great clinicians who work as part of our teams, we are developing a digital transformation team to support health and care organisations to make the best use of the technology available, and which will also bring back real-world intelligence about what works, what could be improved, and what doesn’t work for our users.
We will be establishing small regional teams which will work closely with regional colleagues in NHS England. These teams will have a strong knowledge of the local health economy and their digital strengths and challenges. That understanding will feed back into our work and will enable us to ensure we have feedback and involvement from staff across the NHS at every stage of product development.
This new digital transformation team will also be on hand to offer health and care organisations practical advice on using existing products; how they can get the most out of technology; and support with the business change process that has to accompany digitisation.
We also want to encourage innovators across the sector to work with us to solve real-world problems. The chances are that we can design technological solutions to problems that we may not even know exist yet and, given the size and scale of the NHS, what feel like small solutions could lead to big results.
For example, our statistics tell us that hospitals create more than 16 million discharge summaries every year in England. If an electronic discharge summary means there is a five-minute reduction in the manual handling each time, then that means the NHS could potentially save £50m a year.
We understand that technology alone cannot help the NHS. It isn’t systems that change things, it is the people who use the systems who change things. To make a real difference, digital tools need to be part of a wider business and cultural change. Change can be difficult, so we are developing new ways of working that support organisations to be able to make the right technology choices for themselves, but with access to excellent help and support to guide them through that process and to embed new ways of working so that patients and staff get access to the best technology solutions that are on offer.
For more information
W: www.digital.nhs.uk