How can the health tech market meet NHS demands?
How can the health tech market meet NHS demands?
What’s changed in the NHS tech market? A lot, writes Lynette Ousby, Alcidion’s UK managing director, who considers how demand for more flexible and clinically responsive tech might now be met.
The last couple of years have seen substantial change in healthcare providers’ technology expectations. Rapid tech adoption during the pandemic has provided a glimpse of what’s possible. As the NHS now works hard to recover, frontline teams facing sustained pressures are more willing to challenge suppliers to make sure technology responds to clinical needs.
Electronic filing cabinets – which is what many static electronic patient record (EPR) programmes have delivered – need to evolve. Customers want technology that automates, alleviates cognitive burdens, and provides flexibility to deploy applications when needed.
All of this is expected against the context of government aims to improve performance to pre-pandemic levels, and for the NHS to digitise at pace, with EPR targets driving high levels of digital maturity quickly.
Data policy has moved on too
NHS data policy has also progressed to prevent data lock-in with vendors, through a separation of data and application layers and the use of open standards. This sounds technical, but for clinicians, it should mean access to individual patient information from across a trust or integrated care system and the ability to adopt applications they decide they need.
Converging demands
Demands from policy leads, Integrated Care Systems (ICSs), trust leaders and frontline staff are converging. People want the right solutions quickly, meaning EPRs now need to deliver tangible results with agility and a lower implementation burden.
A modern, modular EPR, based on an open platform, is increasingly seen as a means to achieve convergence. Such solutions allow orchestration, rapid digitisation and convergence around the patient without ripping out technology across a trust or an ICS – a potentially enormous and wasteful undertaking that most cannot afford.
Most NHS organisations don’t want to waste years replacing administrative building blocks. They want health tech vendors to listen and respond to immediate needs, while helping to fulfil longer term integrated digital roadmaps across organisations and regions.
What needs to happen to meet market demands?
Whilst many EPR providers have successfully digitised paper records, they often lack the technology to be able to actively support clinicians and drive real-time insight.
Flexibility means delivering an EPR that can join-up systems – existing and new – within a trust or ICS, and that doesn’t tie healthcare organisations into long and outdated roadmaps, or lock data into silos.
It means having a platform to ingest data from other systems in use across a trust or ICS, utlising open standards to store and access that data, and having a flexible set of applications that can engage with that data in alignment with a set of priorities from a customer. Organisations can then replace legacy applications when appropriate for them.
Start where a customer needs to start
It is important to start where customers’ need change the most. At a time when November’s Autumn Statement has called for improved performance in emergency and elective medicine, this might, for example, mean delivering an electronic observations or patient flow solution as the first EPR module. This can help prevent patients spending unnecessary hours in A&E, or days waiting on wards for certain tasks to be completed, when they should have been moved forward in their care or discharged earlier.
Addressing frontline priorities first can drive clinical enthusiasm for the longer-term digital programme.
Stay clinically focussed
Resistance to monolithic EPR programmes has sometimes come from perceptions that systems are not built for clinicians. With clinical decision support now a national priority, this must be at the heart of the EPR. Technology providers must make the right thing to do the easiest thing to do for busy healthcare professionals. That means providing systems that automate routine activity to alleviate clinical pressures, and that actively promote the right information and actions, at the right time, to ease clinical decisions.
Work together
It’s not an original idea – but collaboration needs to happen more. Though a competitive marketplace is good for the NHS, commercial aggression can be detrimental. There is room in the market for many suppliers, who can bring together a wealth of innovation to give customers choice.
For more information, contact us at info@alcidion.com
