News, Secondary Care

Greater Manchester Digital Platform procures more health tech solutions

The Greater Manchester Digital Platform has welcomed a new group of health tech suppliers to support the development of its next generation digital platform.

The platform is being designed and built to hold, analyse and share information across health, social care and community settings across the region.

The successful suppliers that are joining the programme include Black Pear, Shaping Cloud, Snowflake, Janeiro Digital, Aire Logic, Clinical Architecture and Orion Health.

In November 2019 HTN reported that Civica, Philips Forcare, Objectivity Ltd and ANS were the first suppliers that had won contracts to commence the development of the platform. 

In August the technology will be first tested in Tameside and Salford to join up health and care core record plans.

The new suppliers announced to be supporting the programme:

  • Black Pear – Providing two-way integration of GP systems with acute and community settings to share core care plans which can be updated by any relevant user.
  • Shaping Cloud – Delivering an innovative identity and access management service for use by the GM Digital Platform suite of technologies.
  • Snowflake – Providing a cloud data platform and an analytics and data science platform. This means anonymous data can be extracted, honouring all the national personal data security requirements.
  • Janeiro Digital – Providing software which gives people more control of their own health and care data. GM will be testing the concept of new citizen-held records so people can hold and use their personal data, using the GM Digital Platform. In this way people will have total control over their own data and how it is used.
  • Aire Logic – Building of e-forms and linking of the various components of the platform to support the storage of citizen data. Supporting the creation of situation reporting tools for the GM Covid-19 response and creating an electronic version of the ‘This is me’ from for people with dementia. In addition, building and configuring a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) so health and care data can be stored and shared in a standard format.
  • Clinical Architecture – Delivering terminology and ‘semantic normalisation’ solutions to harmonise disparate coded data to national standard codes.
  • Orion Health – Development of Greater Manchester Integration Engine to support the integration and message flow across the platform, verifying identity so data can be located using the record locator service. Using Rhapsody ® from Lyniate – an integration engine which provides the tools to build and manage the flow of messages across the digital platform.

Phil Swan, GMCA’s Director for Digital, said: “We are already using this technology to support Greater Manchester’s Covid-19 emergency response, making it possible for services to quickly share vital information and provide new services like community hubs with volunteer coordination.”

“Looking ahead, the possibilities created by building this new digital platform are ground breaking. By digitising old paper-based processes and helping connect data, many of our most vulnerable people can get more joined up support across the region, improving the lives of citizens and making savings.”

“The launch of the shared care record plan pilot for frailty and dementia in Tameside and Salford will mean, for the first time, we get bi-directional flow of information across health and social care organisations.”

Gary Birks, General Manager, UK & Ireland, Orion Health “The LHCR programme is crucial to the NHS making continued progress in improving interoperability and patient information sharing, so it’s exciting to be part of the Greater Manchester programme as well as those in Wessex and One South West. Integration is a key enabler for any LHCR, so we look forward to bringing Orion Health’s decades of experience in this field to the Digital Platform.”

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