NHS England has commissioned the development of a place based digital maturity assessment to support local improvement. It will consider the extent to which effective digital technologies are used across health and care systems to improve outcomes and experience.
The work is being carried out by a coalition led by Oxford Academic Health Science Network (Oxford AHSN) working in a partnership with Greater Manchester AHSN and Arden & Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit.
They have brought in a number of other AHSNs and Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) to develop and test the approach in practice, as well as pioneers in creating place based learning health systems – the Connected Health Cities (CHC) partnership of the Northern Health Science Alliance (NHSA).
Mike Denis, Director of Information Strategy at Oxford AHSN, said: “This is an important opportunity to establish a meaningful assessment of digital maturity across the health and care system by drawing from the experiences of citizens, patients and frontline clinicians.”
The assessment will help local health and care systems identify best practice and establish priorities for using digital technologies to support the development of new models of care.
The intention is to base the assessment on what matters to citizens, staff, research and industry.
It will complement the existing digital maturity assessments for secondary care providers, social care and primary care by looking at the whole local health and care system rather than the sum of the parts and focusing on joined up care delivery, integration, population health and prevention. It will take account of pathways, place based civic approaches to using digital to support wellbeing and what is possible through co-ordination across local health and care systems.
It is intended to be a tool to help local systems develop their long-term strategies, including developing new models of care and prioritising their local investment, not to support allocation of national funding.
The work started in April 2017 and will finish in early autumn 2017.