New support by health and social IT integration experts ReStart Consulting, has been announced to support Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) shape their pressing detailed plans for Health System Led Investment (HSLI) funding.
Applications for a share of the £412.5m funding pot fall under extremely tight timescales, with STPs required to submit their plans on how they will use the money by 5th October, recent reports have revealed.
With the application deadline looming, many STPs face the challenge of coordinating the many and varied IT-led transformation requirements of multiple care providers within their local region.
Significantly, the funding from NHS England will be released in phases of 25% in 2018/19, 25% in 2019/20 and 50% in 2020/21, meaning STPs will be unable to pay large upfront costs often associated with integration projects across health and care organisations.
The team at ReStart Consulting, who have developed over 1,000 healthcare interfaces using all major integration platforms, advocate a different approach for STPs.
Mike Symers, ReStart Consulting’s managing director said: “We see a lot of integration projects between local NHS trusts and regional-wide care providers battle with the stakeholder buy-in, information governance challenges and managing realistic expectations around benefits realisation, which can ultimately create a lot of anxiety for those involved.”
Symers continued: “When applying for this type of funding, our advice and guidance to STPs is to address the most immediate needs around improving care delivery and organisational efficiencies in those plans. Technical integration is an enabler for this process, but you do not need to spend your funding on integrating each of your multiple systems through interoperability.”
The enabler Symers referred to is a new toolkit called the Viper360 Presentation Layer, the only multi-directional open interoperability platform that can help health and care organisations build towards a full shared record incrementally.
The Presentation Layer, built by the team at ReStart, offers multiple users, across a range of services, a bespoke view of all available information about a patient, enabling review of the information and write back into multiple IT systems in real-time.
Importantly, the Presentation Layer displays data from multiple systems, rather than connecting them altogether, saving considerable time and effort for transformation teams. It removes the complexities involved in trying to achieve connectivity and interoperability of a multitude of source systems.
Felim McCarthy, senior clinical consultant at ReStart Consulting added: “Whilst I accept there is a need for sharing data for care planning, much of the drive for interoperability is based on secondary use for planning and determining contract pricing but I believe we should be prioritising the immediate needs of improving direct care.
“A truly integrated record is one which provides a care professional with the data necessary to treat an individual and make informed decisions. It is reliant on the actions and thought processes of the individual using the system, rather than on having all the systems ‘talk to each other’.”
The approach to start small, focusing on an immediate clinical or business requirement, and scale up will resonate with STP leads currently working on HSLI plans. The ReStart Consulting team are making themselves available to anyone wanting to discuss HSLI funding in the following areas:
- Improving the completeness of information available in non-acute settings with real time, coded data collection in community and mental health
- Improving ambulance and non-acute access to clinical information and support
- Sharing health and social care information.
FREE CONSULTATION: if you are an STP or local care provider looking for support in developing your HSLI plan, speak to our team of clinical and integration experts today for guidance on reducing the cost of interoperability and releasing clinical, safety and efficiency benefits faster.
