Funding key to digital plan success

Launching the government’s Plan for digital health and social care this week, health and social care secretary Sajid Javid (pictured) said the plans represented a ‘radical programme of modernisation’ that would give patients more control of their care and enable them to manage hospital appointments from the NHS app.

The plan highlights that only 20% of NHS organisations are digitally mature, although 86% have some form of electronic patient record (EPR) in place. The figure is much lower for social care, where only 45% of providers have any form of digital care records.

However, the goal is for all integrated care systems (ICSs) and their constituent organisations to have all the attributes of digital maturity, including electronic records and other critical systems, by March 2025. There are also plans to ‘converge on fewer EPR products’ to make it easier for staff and users to interact with them.

The plan also sets out a goal for every ICS to have implemented a population health and planning data platform and business intelligence tools by 2023

It also outlines the acceleration of the use of digital technology across the NHS and social care to improve efficiency and free up frontline workers’ time to focus on Covid backlogs. According to the Department of Health and Social Care, remote monitoring has already enabled more than 280,000 people with long-term conditions to be supported at home, freeing up hospital beds and saving clinicians’ time. But it said a further 500,000 people could be better supported by March 2023.

And it repeats the ambition for the NHS to scale-up provision of virtual wards with 40-50 virtual ward beds per 100,000 population by the end of 2023/24.

The plan highlights the investment, already announced in the spending review, that has been earmarked to support the digital transformation. Some £2bn will support NHS digitisation, with at least £150m supporting transformation in social care. The investment would enable ‘secure, transformative data-sharing’, help to transform pathways and make the NHS app a ‘front door to the NHS’.

The process for procuring technology solutions will also be improved – enforcing clear technical standards and making better use of the service’s purchasing scale.

NHS Providers said the plan rightly set digital transformation as a high priority for the NHS and provided a much clearer plan of action for trust leaders, who recognised the important role digital tools could play in recovering elective performance and supporting the workforce.  

‘The focus on patient experience and empowering patients to be more involved in their care and data is particularly welcome, and the plan also rightly recognises the role of NHS England in supporting commercial negotiation with technology suppliers and leveraging purchasing power at scale,’ said interim chief executive, Saffron Cordery.

The investment announced in the spending review would begin to help trusts address some of the digital basics and foundations. ‘However, trust leaders continue to feedback that funding remains one of the largest issues,’ she said. ‘Therefore, the department should accelerate the ways this funding reaches the frontline.’

In pushing the NHS towards greater digital maturity over the next three year, the plan said that the Department’s expectations on digital transformation would need to be included in oversight arrangements for trusts and ICSs. The plan said this could be addressed next year with digital possibly featuring in the oversight framework and provider licence from 2023. (An updated NHS oversight framework for 2022/23 has just been published – see Oversight framework updated for system start.) Work will also be undertaken with the Care Quality Commission to agree a process for embedding digital maturity into its assessment framework.

NHS Providers warned that this digital oversight would need to be ‘proportionate and appropriate given the number of priorities trust leaders are tasked with’.