Briefing / Making a difference with digital technologies: identifying and evaluating benefits

Digital technologies such as digital medicine, genomics, artificial intelligence and robotics have a huge potential to transform the delivery of healthcare. These technologies can empower patients to participate actively in their care, with a greater focus on wellbeing and prevention. They also support the prediction of individual disease risk and personalise the management of long-term conditions. 

Ensuring that investment in digital technologies makes a difference is key to sustainable transformation.

This briefing focuses on identifying and realising benefits for digital transformation. It is not a comprehensive guide to benefits management, but explores some of the key issues, illustrated with examples. It covers:

• understanding the problem that needs solving
• making the case for investment by identifying the potential benefits
• understanding the resource impact of new care models
• defining the metrics and identifying sources of evidence
• measuring success.

The HFMA briefing, Accounting for revenue and capital: implications for the digital age, explores the key funding and accounting issues that need to be considered when developing business cases for digital transformation projects.  

This briefing forms part of the Delivering value with digital technologies programme, a 12 month programme of work from the HFMA, supported by Health Education England. The aim of the programme is to increase awareness amongst NHS finance staff about digital healthcare technologies, and enable finance to take an active role in supporting the use of digital technology to transform services and drive value and efficiency.

To find out more about HFMA’s Delivering value with digital technologies programme, click here.