Reports
From patients to care.data, NHS Expo uncovered
Highland Marketing reports on some of the key stories at the Health and Care Innovation Expo. More…
News in brief
Hunt says NHS on track for patients’ access to their GP records: Health secretary, Jeremy Hunt has said 95% of NHS patients will be able to access their GP care records online, free of charge, by the time of the next general election, reported Health Service Journal (subscription required). Speaking at NHS England’s Health and Care Innovation Expo in Manchester, Hunt said by April 2015 patients would be able to access their own GP records online, as well as book GP appointments and order repeat prescriptions, as part of a wider move to “e-booking” and “e-consultations”. The health secretary made a commitment that by the end of 2014, one third of accident and emergency departments, ambulance services and 111 call handlers would be able to access patients’ GP records. He said these goals were “hard-wired” into the NHS. In a speech on how technology would improve NHS care, Hunt defended the work of NHS England national director for patients and information Tim Kelsey, who has been overseeing the controversial care.data data sharing initiative. He said Mr Kelsey had assured him that work on giving patients’ access to their records was going to plan. “By the end of this year, Tim [Kelsey] has promised me that one third of ambulance services and one third of 111 centres will be able to access people’s GP electronic health records so that if someone gives their consent when they are talking to a doctor or a nurse on the phone, that person will be able to access their health record.”
Hospital records used to ‘target ads on Twitter and Facebook’ say privacy campaigners, in latest NHS data concerns: The security of NHS data was thrown into further doubt this week after it emerged anonymous patient information has been used by a marketing consultancy to advise clients on targeting their social media campaigns, according to The Independent. It comes amid growing concerns over plans to trawl patient records from every GP surgery in England, which were postponed last month after NHS chiefs admitted they had not done enough to inform and reassure the public about the scheme, known as care.data. MPs sought reassurances last week that the GP data, which could be accessed by researchers and approved private companies, would not be vulnerable to breaches of patient confidentiality. In another blow to public confidence in the scheme, it was also reported that the entire hospital episodes statistics (HES) dataset has been uploaded to Google servers. A management consultancy firm called PA Consulting used Google tools to create interactive maps out of HES data, it emerged. The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) issued a statement this week confirming that its predecessor, the NHS Information Centre, had signed an agreement to share HES statistics with PA Consulting in 2011, and that it had used a tool called Google BigQuery to manipulate the datasets. The HSCIC statement confirms that it knew PA Consulting was going to use the tool, and that it imposed a number of safeguards. It says it received “written confirmation from PA Consulting that no Google staff would be able to access the data” and that “data continued to be restricted to the individuals named in the [original] data sharing agreement. Pulse reported this week that the health secretary has announced that the government will bring in legislation to protect any records obtained through NHS England’s care.data scheme from being shared for the commercial gain of companies outside the health service.
Treasury releases tech fund money: The Treasury has approved funding for the second tranche of projects in the first round of the ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards: Technology Fund’. Paul Rice, NHS England’s head of technology strategy, told eHealth Insider (EHI) that trusts will be notified that the approval means they can draw down the money from the start of April 2014. The tech fund was set up to support health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s call for a ‘paperless’ NHS, and was announced as two separate sums of money. Trusts had limited time to submit bids for the first £260m fund, some £90m of which must be spent by the start of the next financial year. NHS England announced that it had approved £218m for 234 projects from this fund in December. However, EHI reported last week that several winning trusts had to resubmit their value for money cases and were still awaiting Treasury approval. Some of the money held up by the Treasury comes from the £90m of public dividend capital funding that must be spent before the end of the 2013-14 financial year under Department of Health rules. This means that approved projects, with part of their spend budgeted for this financial year, will have to be funded by money earmarked for another financial year. Speaking at the Health and Social Care Innovation Expo in Manchester, Rice said he did not know the exact final figures, but estimated that about half of the £90m would make its way to successful organisations.
Patients to benefit from £30 million Nursing Technology Fund investment: Seventy five NHS Trusts across the country will benefit from £30 million to buy technology for nurses, midwives and care staff. It is the first round of investment of the £100m ‘Nursing Technology Fund’ which was announced by Prime Minister, David Cameron. NHS England launched the application process for funding last year. The funding will be used to buy technologies such as digital pens, tablets and clinical software to support nurses and midwives to develop modern practices and do their jobs more easily. Trusts applying for the funding had to demonstrate how their technology projects would deliver real improvements to patient care and safety. Making the announcement about the successful projects at the national NHS Health and Care Innovation Expo conference in Manchester this week, Beverley Bryant, director of strategic systems and technology at NHS England, said: “This is about using modern technology to support and facilitate staff in providing compassionate and personalised nursing care. It is about making life easier for staff – for example a digital pen can improve record keeping and reduce paperwork, a tablet or iPad can mean a community nurse can work on the go without needing to make as many trips back to the office, which means more time spent with patients. Also, mobile IT devices that can be used at the bedside put valuable information at a nurse’s fingertips. This is ultimately about enabling nurses and midwives to improve the care they provide for patients.” A list of the successful trusts and case studies are available on the NHS England website.
Scottish parliament votes £20 million for telehealth and telecare: Scottish health secretary Alex Neil says £10m investment will ensure patients in Scotland have secure online access to their own health information by 2020, reports The Information Daily. Mr Neil has also announced a further £10 million to support telehealth and telecare projects that will allow patients to better manage their health, care and wellbeing at home. This investment, says the Scottish minister for health, will enable more patients to use technology such as tablet computers, smartphones and other digital devices to monitor conditions such as diabetes, heart problems and lung problems in their own homes. The longer term plan for digital records will offer patients and health staff immediate access to information on current health issues, and allow patients to provide up-to-date details such as an emergency contact. NHS Scotland has made “significant progress” in moving away from paper records. This has been supported by £770 million investment from the Scottish Government in digital technologies since 2007. Mr Neil said “I am determined that as technology continues to evolve, digital health tools will play a bigger part of our NHS and support our vision for twenty-first century healthcare.”
GP IT funding split evenly nationwide: GP IT funding will be paid to clinical commissioning groups on a per-head-of-population basis under new plans revealed by NHS England. The national commissioning board is also due to release an updated version of its operating model, ‘securing excellence in GP IT’, which will cover what core IT services practices need and benchmarking of costs to procure them. NHS England has decided to split the £186m fund earmarked for GP IT support evenly between Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) based on their population size. A pot of money will also be kept back by the centre, which CCGs can apply for if they need extra money for already committed spend. NHS England’s programme head of primary care IT Tracey Grainger told eHealth Insider that the size of the central pot has not been determined, but it will smooth the transition process for CCGs, especially those that previously had a much larger GP IT budget than they will now receive. “We’re going to keep some money back for transitional funding to help with the smoothing of an equalised funding arrangement and for those CCGs that can demonstrate a higher running cost than their budget, they can apply for this transitional funding,” she said. Grainger added that there will also be a “stretch within the local funding” because some of the services previously funded by CCGs will be funded under the new GP systems of Choice contract, due to be signed by the end of this month.
NHS to face compulsory data protection audits: The NHS could soon face compulsory data protection audits, as the Government pushes ahead with plans to improve the health service’s handling of patient data, reported ITPRO. The plans were outlined by Simon Hughes, minister of state for justice and civil liberties, during an address earlier this week at the Information Commissioner’s Office’s (ICO) Data Protection Practitioner Conference. Hughes, who only took up his current government role two months ago, said the NHS is being targeted because of the large amounts of sensitive data it regularly handles. We have recently conducted a consultation on extending the ICO’s powers of compulsory audit to NHS bodies. This requires secondary legislation which we plan to introduce before the summer recess so that the power can come into effect by the autumn,” said Hughes. “We have chosen the NHS as it is one of the largest data controllers in the UK, processing huge amounts of sensitive personal data on a daily basis.” The practice could also be extended to other industries, added Hughes, depending on how its work with the NHS goes.
NHS England to use technology to tackle missed GP appointments: Over 12 million GP appointments are missed every year in the UK, costing over £162 million, NHS England have said. A further 6.9 million outpatient hospital appointments are missed each year in the UK, costing an average of £108 per appointment in 2012/13, reported Commissioning GP. NHS England is planning to tackle missed appointments, known as Did not Attends (DNAs), using technology, as it hopes that by making the appointment system fit into patient’s lives more easily, there will be fewer missed appointments, saving precious NHS resources. Simple initiatives such as sending email and text reminders are now used by many clinics, and are already beginning to have an impact; outpatient DNAs have fallen to 9.1% from 10.5% in 2008/9. Now, the NHS is rolling out solutions which let patients check, book and cancel appointments at their own convenience and order repeat medication online. Telecare and telehealth services are also expanding, which means patients can monitor their health at home and access medical advice without regular visits to their surgery. Beverley Bryant, NHS England, said: “Patient care is always at the top of our agenda. That‘s why we are doing everything we can to make our service match with people’s lifestyles and the technology they use, to give more people easy access to the services they need. We hope the public will do their bit too by making sure they attend or cancel appointments in good time. That way, everybody benefits.”
New NHS Choices open to SMEs: The successor to NHS Choices will not be outsourced, but run in-house with help from a number of small and medium-sized enterprises, eHealth Insider (EHI) has learned. A beta version of the new NHS Choices website was on show at the Health and Social Care Innovation Expo in Manchester this week. Previously called the Integrated Customer Service Platform and now called the Health and Social Care Digital Service, the “daughter of NHS Choices” aims to be the ‘digital front door’ to the NHS. NHS Choices staff were transferred to the Health and Social Care Information Centre after the Cabinet Office blocked the renewal of Capita’s contract to run the service early last year. Around 120 staff continued to run the site. The plan, outlined in a paper to the Information Services Commissioning Group last July, was for the various parts of the new NHS Choices to go back out to tender from April 2014. However, NHS England’s director of customer relations John Coulthard told EHI the service would not be put out to tender, but run in-house using a number of SMEs. He said that while the contract was with Capita for seven years, the criticism was that the service did not sufficiently evolve. “The question is not whether or not we outsource, but how much of the spend on digital services encourages or is spent with other UK SMEs. It used to be the case that a big chunk of that spend was with one company, Capita, but we’re increasingly going to spread that across the UK Plc,” said Coulthard.
NHS must be open over mistakes, says review: The NHS in England must be open and honest about mistakes, a government commissioned inquiry recommends. The review – by a leading surgeon and hospital boss – called for a statutory duty of candour on hospitals, GPs and other organisations when errors were made that caused significant harm, reported the BBC. Crucially for campaigners, the definition includes moderate levels of harm such as pressure ulcers. The move had been called for by the Stafford Hospital public inquiry. However when ministers unveiled their official response to the inquiry at the end of last year, this was one of the few recommendations they did not back in full. There were concerns it could lead to more legal action being taken. So instead the government set up this review, which was led by Royal College of Surgeons president Prof Norman Williams and Salford Royal Hospital chief executive Sir David Dalton, to look at how it should work in detail. Prof Williams said his view was that patients were more interested in openness rather than money. “When things do go wrong, patients and their families want to be told honestly about what happened, how it might be corrected and to know it will not happen to someone else,” he added. The review recommended the duty be placed on organisations not individuals and would cover the private health and social care sectors as well as the NHS. The government is expected to make its final decision in the coming months.
Health service is ‘unsustainable’, NHS director warns: The NHS is in an unsustainable position and is running at full capacity, an acute care director has warned. Professor Keith Willett, director of acute care for NHS England, said urgent changes need to be made as hospitals are struggling with the burden of the large number of people going to A&E, reported The Telegraph. He dismissed the mild winter as easing the pressure on emergency care, and warned that hospitals are already running on stretched resources. “The NHS is running at full capacity,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme. “It’s in an unsustainable position in terms of urgent care for the future. We will have to make substantial changes to the way our patients are cared for outside hospital.” He said about 18% of patients admitted they had gone to A&E for non-urgent care when they did not need to. He added: “The majority of people do seem to recognise that A&E is under pressure, but one in four said they would go again if they couldn’t access their GP. In the long term we will run into problems again.” Prof Willett said the problem facing A&E departments now was not the number of people attending but the volume who now need to be admitted because care outside hospital is not good enough.
NHS to tackle long waits for dementia assessments: Following December’s G8 summit, the UK continues to lead the world in the fight against dementia with a £90 million package to improve dementia diagnosis and care and the appointment of a World Dementia Envoy to raise funds for research towards a cure. Leading British businesses have also signed up to the cause with over 190,000 staff at M&S, Argos, Homebase, Lloyds Bank and Lloyds Pharmacy to learn to support customers who have dementia, announced The Department of Health. Following the ambition set out as part of the Prime Minister’s Challenge on Dementia, NHS England will invest £90 million in diagnosing two thirds of people with dementia by March 2015. As part of this, NHS England will work with local areas where we know that in some cases it takes up to 25 weeks to carry out diagnostic assessments whereas in others the wait is as little as six weeks on average. As well as improving diagnosis, the GP Contract that the health secretary recently negotiated will mean that from April, every person over 75 will have a named accountable GP and the most vulnerable 2% in each practice will receive an enhanced service including same day telephone consultations and proactive case management. Health secretary, Jeremy Hunt said: “Dementia can be a horrific and heartbreaking disease, but it is my mission as health secretary to make this country the best place in the world to get a dementia diagnosis, as well as a global leader in the fight to find a cure. To have variation in diagnosis rates from a few weeks to close to six months is totally unacceptable and I am pleased that the NHS England have agreed to address this within the funding they have available.”
Healthcare providers in India to spend USD 1.08 Billion on IT in 2014, says Gartner: Health care providers in India are expected to spend 1.08 billion US Dollars (USD) on IT products and services in 2014, an increase of 4% over 2013, according to Gartner, Inc. This forecast includes spending by health care providers (including, hospitals and hospital systems, as well as ambulatory service and physicians’ practices) on internal IT, hardware, software, external IT services and telecommunications, reported Information Week. “India is expected to continue various healthcare technology investments through large private hospitals and state wide eHealth initiatives,” said Anurag Gupta, research director at Gartner.” Hospital information systems, picture archiving and communications systems, electronic health records and mobile technologies will be high on hospitals’ agenda. “IT services, which includes consulting, implementation, IT outsourcing and business process outsourcing, will be the largest overall spending category throughout the forecast period within the healthcare providers sector. It is expected to reach 276 million USD in 2014, up from 266 million USD in 2013 – with the consulting segment growing by 8%.
Events
UK Trade & Investment and NHS England work in partnership to organise a UK SME delegation to Health Datapalooza: Health Datapalooza is a US national conference focused on liberating health data and bringing together companies, start-ups, academics, government agencies and innovators to discuss the latest and most effective uses of health data to improve patient outcomes. The event, which takes place in Washington, D.C. on 1-3 June 2014, is expected to attract over 2,000 attendees and provides the perfect opportunity to network with key Health IT industry leaders from both the U.S. and abroad. To register your interest, please complete the application form before 5pm on 20th March 2014.
HC2014, 19-20 March, Manchester Central: Visit Highland Marketing on stand P4, to see how we can help you keep your marketing healthy! You can catch up on all the action from the event on our livestream.
Opinion
The NHS does not use innovation effectively
In this week’s Guardian Healthcare Network, Professor Lord Darzi, stresses that despite the healthcare industry’s strong track record in innovating, the NHS has failed to spread new ideas and improve performance, due to, in the main, a lack of resources.
Supporting that argument, Darzi said that simply communicating innovative practices could save more lives than other scientific advances such as gene therapy, stem cell science and cancer vaccine development: “Almost 200 years after Semmelweiss discovered how lack of hygiene on maternity wards was killing new mothers, we – patients, public and medical staff – still don’t wash our hands consistently. It was 90 years before doctors treating women with breast cancer accepted that Halsted’s mutilating radical mastectomy was ineffective. We need to do better than this – find better ways of spreading good practice, eliminating outdated practice and using what works.
“Over a decade ago cardiac surgeon Sir Bruce Keogh, now medical director of the NHS, challenged the then medical orthodoxy by launching a campaign for the publication of death rates following heart surgery.
“In the years since British heart surgeons first published their results, survival rates have increased by a third and 1,000 patients now live each year when they might previously have died. Yet other surgical specialties have been slow to follow and are only now starting to measure their own outcomes.
“Innovation must be focused on improving the quality of care. But it is also essential to meet the immense financial pressures that lie ahead.”
A note of caution about NHS Change Day
This week in Health Service Journal (subscription required), Partha Kar, consultant in diabetes and blogger, argues that the motives behind NHS Change Day are admirable, but the event is devalued by pledges to do things that should be happening already and the cynicism they attract.
“NHS Change Day is an occasion where you should pledge to do something that is beyond the norm. Then I read pledges such as “pledge to ensure safe care”, “ensure equality in workplace”, and something broader became clear.
“The same issue has also created cynics about campaigns such as the 6Cs or #hellomynameis. Have we got that isolated or insulated at work, has it all become so unbearable that we now have to pledge to be compassionate, pledge to say “thank you”, pledge to “treat each patient as a member of my family?
“The good thing is that the day is driven by the grassroots (though some cynics oppose even that). There are also some absolutely brilliant pledges: a chief executive planning to read bedtime stories to the kids or another pledging to daily visit patients who have no family. These are heart warming, outside what they need to do and outside what they are paid to do. They are brilliant gestures for which I have nothing but utmost respect.
“To the organisers of Change Day, you need a bit of cautious optimism. Don’t let the event be hijacked by people jumping on the bandwagon with pledges that raise questions along the lines of: “What have you been doing so long?”
Ade Memoire: on developing apps
This week in eHealth Insider, Adrian Byrne, the director of IM&T at Southampton University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, reflects on the challenges of a tablet-based world.
“A question. Why is it, four years after the release of the iPad, that we are not seeing clinicians routinely carrying out their work on one of these lightweight, touch screen wonders?
“The answer, in short, is that while your favourite, everyday websites – news, information and retail – have provided a very good mobile experience, your heavyweight, workhorse healthcare applications have not. Generally speaking there are two reasons for this. The first is that in the wider world there was a commercial need to supply something that ran on the users’ favourite device.
“The second is that with many apps having world-wide potential, even though they use very generic data and views, those involved can apply their global development team to get it done.
“Successful tablet based applications are small and well defined. Is it possible that we will be able to develop tablet-based apps that fulfil a function – such as observations collection – and feed their data into something like a clinical data repository so that it links up with the rest of the electronic patient record?
“My own belief is that unless you are blessed with the kind of resource I could only dream about, we are going to have to standardise on a platform. And, in the cases where an HTML 5 version will fit the bill, cut down on the number of browsers and platforms we support.”
The spirit of the NHS is compassion and progress
In Health Service Journal (subscription required) this week, Dame Gill Morgan, chair of Foundation Trust Network and the Alzheimers Society, says the NHS can only improve its quality of care and its culture if boards empower frontline staff.
“Delivering high quality patient care is the main reason why people come to work in health and social care – and quality of care leads the agenda for the service today.
“I’m very aware how challenging the situation currently is for everybody, and how hard organisations and their staff teams of all professions are working just now. Our members are having to deal with rising and extended demand and expectation, due to our population living longer and new technology: both a sign of the NHS’s success. They’re also rightly facing the need to ensure all services that we deliver to patients are of both the highest quality and the right level of compassion at all times, while operating within the current constrained financial envelope.
“The best organisations have always had their main focus on quality. Now providers, commissioners and system leaders across health and care economies need to make sense of how to deliver this, at the intimate level of contact between patient and healthcare professional, at the local organisational level and across our systems and networks.
“Much was already changing before Francis; much has changed since and the pace of improvement has accelerated. This has been the spirit of the NHS for as long as I have known it, albeit one that hasn’t always had the space and support needed to flourish. I think the Francis report has changed that and given a new focus to our action.
“To deliver these improvements, we have to help people who come to work every day to deliver great care: to recognise and celebrate it when it happens, as well as to tackle issues swiftly when we fail.”
Highland Marketing blog
In this week’s blog, Matthew D’Arcy reviews the key outcomes from Health and Care Innovation Expo14.
