Digital Trusts – What good looks like

I was recently invited to join a thought leadership panel discussion on Digital Trusts, Digital Teams, Measuring Value and Demonstrating Impact. Essentially, this was a discussion about ‘What good looks like’. All of these topics are very close to my heart, so I was delighted to accept. The discussion was part of the HTN Now series of live online events that are completely free for NHS employees to attend – and open to anyone else to join.

My fellow panellists comprised Georgie Duncan, associate CCIO at Leeds Teaching Hospitals and Neill Crump, Digital Strategy Director at The Dudley Group.

Include every area of healthcare

We started off talking about how to make sure that the basic elements are put in place first for any digitalisation journey, and how to ensure that the entire Trust is covered, including all clinical workflows and community teams as well. One point that came through loud and clear is the need to ‘level up’ care away from the hospital if the NHS is to move to a ‘prevention is better than cure approach’. Clinicians need to be able to access patient data securely while away from the hospital or clinic. This not only supports decision making at the point of care, but it is also enabling clinicians to work from home and helping to achieve a better work-life balance, which often means quicker responses, giving patients faster results. In addition, we discussed how data and analytics is key to continuous improvement and leveraging existing investments.

Interoperability and open standards

When we talk about digital maturity, we are really referring to the use of tech by the clinical workforce, and for this to happen effectively that tech needs to be as easy and transparent as possible. As more and more healthcare organisations move to a Trust-wide electronic patient record (EPR), fast, secure access to clinical systems and information is becoming increasingly important.

At Imprivata we have been working on the new Spine CIS2 platform, helping clinicians further transition to improved, simple and secure authentication. Working with CIS2 published open standards drives the interoperability agenda and helps to ensure that more systems are capable of speaking a common language in the NHS. Ensuring interoperability between disparate systems means it is much easier to implement systems like single sign-on and so provide a seamless experience for clinicians that can login in once and then switch between systems as required. They don’t need to know what happens ‘under the hood’, they just want the tools to enable them to do their job. We discuss the importance of open standards and interoperability more fully in our recent blog: Open Standards – the debate continues but the benefits shine through

Professionalise Health IT skills

While the focus is always on the patient and the clinician, it is also important to acknowledge the great work that IT teams do within the healthcare sector. We discussed the requirement for the right mix of skills from a range of roles across the organisation within any team looking to introduce change. Building the profile of the IT professional within health by collaborating with British Computer Society, and more local groups like the Midlands Digital Skills Network, provides digital teams with the opportunity to enhance their professional qualifications. This is something that Andrew Griffiths, CEO of FEDIP, the Federation for Informatics Professionals in health and care, talked about in his recent blog: Great healthcare provision is dependent on great IT. How can we support and develop the informatics professionals needed to deliver the solutions?

Highlight benefits of digitalisation to Leadership

Finally, we rounded off by sharing ways in which to raise the profile of successful digital projects with leadership and the Board, raising the credibility and understanding of exactly how much can be achieved by digital transformation. A prime example given by Neill, was the introduction of a Patient Portal at The Dudley Group. One of its functions was to issue digital appointment letters, something welcomed by patients, however, this change also saved over £500,000 per year, just on stamps! Those kinds of savings are guaranteed to get any healthcare leader’s full attention.

A report of the full discussion can be found at htn.co.uk