March 22, 2023 @ LONDON
March 22, 2023 @ LONDON
Parsek had a significant presence at the big health tech show of the year, which focused on the importance of collaboration and transformation to addressing the challenges faced by the NHS; and highlighted the importance of using a fully interoperable, disease-agnostic platform to drive collaboration and transformation.
Collaboration was one of the big themes of Digital Health Rewired 2023. The tone was set by former health minister Patricia Hewitt when she told the opening session: “The Covid-19 pandemic, horrible as it was, facilitated a new spirit of collaboration to support the most vulnerable people that are continuing to this day.”
That new spirit will be taken forward by the 42 integrated care systems that started work last summer, with a four-fold remit to improve population health outcomes, reduce inequality, improve productivity, and help the NHS to deliver broader economic goals.
The government has asked Hewitt to conduct an independent review of the new bodies to make sure local leaders are being empowered to deliver the change required.
Over two days, the conference at Islington’s Business Design Centre heard that technology will also be essential; to break open siloed systems, create new care pathways, support clinicians, empower patients, and generate data for analysis.
Reflecting on the event from the Parsek stand,
Chief Executive Janez Bensa said:
“Listening to keynote speakers and panellists, the message that comes through is that it’s all about improving collaboration across regions – ICSs and clinical networks.”
The urge to increase efficiency is evident, and we can achieve a lot by enabling professionals, making sure that solutions are organised around users and not institutions, and supporting patient self-management.
“By sharing the necessary data – by operating with open and structured data that can be used along care pathways and clinical workflows – we can also support transparent decision making, better outcomes, and analysis to support further transformation and research.”
Digitise, connect, transform – and pick up the pace
The importance of technology-enabled change was underlined by Dr Tim Ferris, NHS England’s director of transformation. In his keynote session, he said waiting lists may be at 7 million, and unions may be striking for better pay and safer conditions, but demand is only going to increase as the population ages.
“The current model of care is not tenable. We do not have the people or the funds,” he said. “We need to do things differently, and that means technology. All of you know this. I’m not saying anything new here. The controversial bit is – how do we pick up the pace?”
Dr Ferris said he saw NHS England’s role as being to “convene” people and ideas to “digitise, connect and transform.” On the digital front, he said the frontline digitisation programme is “on track” to level up electronic patient records at acute trusts and to “converge” the number of core systems in use.
While the focus of “connect” is making better use of the shared care records that have been implemented by every ICS in England. However, in a best-practice showcase sponsored by Parsek, medical director Joe McDonald argued this won’t be enough to transform ways of working.
A regional collaboration platform – the missing link in health tech
Reflecting on his long involvement with health tech Joe McDonald said: “I have been around the block. I was the clinical lead (mental health) for the National Programme for IT, where I did quite well, getting EPRs into trusts. Then, when I went back to the North East, I developed something called the Great North Care Record.
“So, I was feeling quite smug. I thought: we have digitised mental health; we have created a shared care record; I can retire now. But the big news is: an EPR and an SCR are essential, but they are not enough.”
Joe said he realised this when his mother developed dementia and needed to leave her care home and move into a specialist unit. Getting the many professionals from her “constellation of care” together to agree this was almost impossible; and he realised they needed a platform to work on.
“You put in GP records, and EPRs, and SCRs, but then you need a regional collaboration platform that integrates with them – and with the PDFs and the phone systems that are used in social care and the third sector,” he said. “Then, on top of that, you put in a personal health record. Although, eventually, I think this flips upside down, and everything is controlled by the patient.”
Parsek’s flagship solution, Vitaly, forms what Joe has also called the “missing link” in health tech. It uses international, open standards to create bi-directional links with IT and communications systems and adds tools to automate the collection of the data they contain, so professionals can access it efficiently during multi-disciplinary team meetings or when they are collaborating across new patient pathways.
Making clinicians’ lives easier
Back in the conference, Dr Ferris had a long list of projects for the “transform” part of NHS England’s “digitise, connect, transform” mantra. These ranged from the NHS App to bed management and patient flow systems and from the “really cool stuff” of pathway transformation to the “big task” of “sorting out the paperwork” or reducing the administrative burden faced by clinicians.
Zan Virtnik, UK market lead for Parsek, said he was delighted to hear about this last point.
“There is no doubt that we need to think about the patient and how they can be empowered, but we also need to think about the clinician.”
“How can we simplify processes and eliminate steps that take hours and hours but can be automated? That is a really strong focus for Parsek: how can we work with clinicians to make their lives easier?”
Pick a disease-agnostic system – create an ecosystem for change
If clinicians need easier lives, then so do chief information officers. One of the challenges facing the IT leads who visited the huge exhibition at Digital Health Rewired 2023 was how to find the right solutions from the many, many approaches, software systems, and apps on offer across the two halls and many gantries of the BDS.
In a second session sponsored by Parsek, looking at the challenges faced by cancer networks, Graham King, the chief information officer at Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said it was important to take a strategic approach.
“We need to look at people, and not just at their condition,” he said; arguing that ICSs and trusts should be looking for a platform that will enable them to transform multiple pathways, instead of ending up with multiple products to support patients with different forms of cancer or, indeed, other conditions.
The CIO also said that since he got “a million emails” from suppliers, it was important for them to be able to prove their interoperability and benefits claims. Reflecting on his comments, Zan added: “Many of the CIOs and CCIOs that I talked to said the market is saturated with solutions for single diseases, but Parsek is disease agnostic.
“You can use Vitaly to create an ecosystem that will support many pathways, so you don’t have to go back to the market to buy again and again”. It was also great to hear a focus on KPIs, because that is the way to find evidence to show that you have addressed a problem.
“When you have evidence to say ‘we have improved the quality of care, or saved x number of appointments, or become x more efficient by going paperless’, you have a strong case for addressing the next challenge.”
Think big – there is no plan B
That strong case will need to be made to clinicians, whose engagement is essential to the success of digital projects. Although, as many conference sessions heard, the most successful digital projects these days are those that don’t think of themselves as digital projects, but as change management projects.
And, Dr Ferris reiterated: “Change is essential. We have to aspire to the kind of change that makes a step-change in efficiency and outcome. Because what is plan B?”