A group of health tech suppliers have won contracts with Greater Manchester to commence the development of a next generation digital platform.
The Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership (GMHSCP) and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) are working together to invest £7.5m in new technologies that support better ways of working and join up data from the many systems across public services.
Cllr Elise Wilson, Portfolio Lead for Digital City Region at the GMCA, said “This is a game changing initiative for the people of Greater Manchester and the digital capabilities we are creating have the potential to be re-used to improve many other public services too. It shows what a joint effort can achieve when public services come together with a strong focus on the people they support.”
The successful providers include:
- Civica has been appointed to develop an Enterprise Master Patient Index, which ensures information shared between systems is safely attached to the correct person’s records.
- Philips Forcare has been selected to develop a Record Locator Service, which allows different systems to find and retrieve records relevant to an individual in different care settings.
- Objectivity Ltd has been appointed to develop a citizen app, based on the Mendix low-code platform.
- ANS are providing cloud consultancy and services to the programme to enable us to achieve a ‘Cloud First’ approach to deployment. This will help us to deliver a cost effective, stable and secure platform hosting all the software providers’ services from deployment stage through to production.
The solutions are in addition to the local shared care records in place across the city region, using Graphnet’s Care Centric system.
Accenture has also been appointed to provide additional programme assurance and to support the design, configuration and testing of the technology solutions.
Niamh McKenna, UK health lead at Accenture, said “We are pleased to be supporting Greater Manchester with this valuable programme. Keeping pace with technology while ensuring the security and efficiency of the nation’s nurses and doctors and the wider public sector is a challenge facing every region in this country. With this programme our intention is to help Greater Manchester create best in class digital care pathways and an information sharing environment that supports clinicians, the wider public sector and the citizens alike.”
Nigel Lomas, Public Sector Lead at Objectivity, said “This is a very exciting project not only for Objectivity and GMCA but for the whole of public sector as this advance has not been achieved previously on such a scale. We believe this will not only help integrate data across Greater Manchester, nonetheless will provide a model to be utilised elsewhere, using a low code platform helps accelerate the development and delivery of applications to benefit the citizen”
The process is being overseen jointly by the GMCA and Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, part of the Northern Care Alliance, on behalf of the GMHSCP.
