HEALTHCARE

Citizen-centric holistic and preventative health and social care

Health and social care solutions have always been designed and built to support the needs of specific care providers (GP practices, hospitals, care homes, etc.). As such they have led to the disconnect we see today between, and within primary, secondary and social care. Furthermore, the current approach also leads to solutions that are inflexible and not agile enough to meet the fast changing demands of health and social care, because they are designed around technology and best practice at the time the solution was conceived. Put another way, current generation of solutions are out of date the day they are launched.

Datamation has developed the platform and approach to support Next Generation Citizen-Centric solutions, to move away from being reactive (treating people when they become ill, or have an injury), to keeping them healthy and safe in the first place. To this end we believe the starting point should not be defining system functionality, but defining the care needs of each individual – the Personal Care Plan (PCP). For instance, for a diabetic person, this would include continual monitoring of blood sugar level, regular check-ups and an exercise regime. Once these are defined, the resources needed in care, tools and materials can be collated and costed, then used to Plan and Execute the delivery of personalised healthcare for that individual.

This is a new paradigm for health and social care which is flexible and easy to implement and scale-up within the new NHS and social care organisational structures.

The benefits

Seamless delivery of health and social care

Managing patient records as complete, consistent and up-to-date sets enables all those delivering care to work seamlessly. That is, when one care professional takes an action that impacts, or is impacted by, another that action is ‘visible’ – in real time – to the other affected care professionals. This avoids human errors that may lead to adverse events or even deaths.

Addressing data privacy, security and consent issues

Managing patient records in one place, makes it easier to implement effective access controls to ensure that care professionals can only access the part of the patient record they need to enable them to carry out their respective tasks effectively. For example, a carer who may be a neighbour or friend has access only to basic information, whereas the GP or hospital consultant has access to full clinical data, and researchers can be granted time-limited consent to part of the record for a clinical trial.

Data privacy and consent issues have until now, been a major challenge when a wide range of personnel are involved in the care process. This is highlighted by the failure of major programmes such as the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) and Care.Data, and the difficulties being encountered in implementing the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Datamation’s universal Information Platform enables effective multi-level access and consent controls making it easy to ensure that each person has the correct level of access to data they need to carry out their respective tasks effectively.

Harnessing the power of innovative technologies

Our radical approach will also make it easier to harness the benefits of the innovative digital healthcare technologies that are appearing every day. These can make real difference in improving the quality of care as well as reducing costs. Here are four types of such technologies and the benefits they deliver:

• Measure, monitor, alert devices can capture health and fitness tracking data efficiently and accurately in real time.
  
• Mobile devices that can deliver data to care professionals where, and in the form, they need it. This means those delivering care can make informed decisions based on complete, consistent and up-to-date data. They also enable remote delivery of care.
  
• AI and Predictive analytics can play very important part in preventative care and research into better treatments and medicines.
  
• Decision support analytics helps planning and best use of human and capital resources.

Use of these technologies is being hampered today by the need to establish a connection – often in a bespoke way – to each of the different systems they need to be used on, e.g. GP practice system, hospital or care home systems. This significantly increases the cost of their deployment. With the Datamation approach only one connection (to the Datamation uIP) is needed to make its data available for use in any uIP powered solution.

Lessons we bring to healthcare from other highly regulated sectors

The challenges we have addressed in other highly regulated industries are equally applicable in healthcare. This allows us to bring to healthcare valuable lessons learnt in other sectors, many of which are yet to be considered in healthcare. The first is that patient records have to be managed in one place as complete, consistent, and up-to-date sets to help deliver joined-up and personalised care. Others include making health and social care much safer by adopting the ‘Black-Box Culture’. For instance, when a plane crashes, ship sinks, process plant explodes or a bridge collapses, accident investigators look for the cause, learn lessons and mandate industry-wide changes to avoid similar occurrences in future.

The table below shows four examples of lessons that would benefit healthcare which are very difficult to implement in the current disjointed health and social care data infrastructures. We have already shown how the first two can be delivered in our healthcare demonstrator, see next section. Capabilities to support the other two are already built into the Datamation uIP.

Lesson	Impact in healthcare
Prevent / reduce the chances of human error by enabling all those delivering care to work holistically.	Save lives and avoid incidents that may leave citizens with lasting disability. Also release care capacity that would otherwise have been spent on corrective actions.
Support feedback between all those delivering care, and between them and the Service User (patient).	In addition to enabling those delivering care to work seamlessly, this provides valuable data for research.
Create the environment to learn from past failure (Black-Box Culture).	Move to better quality and safer healthcare in the way that made aviation the safest industry sector.
Introduce predictive analytics and AI.	Enable early intervention to avoid serious complications.