The NHS Transformation Directorate’s Digital Productivity Programme has allocated £12 million in funding, with a focus on automation, real time location systems, and extended reality.
The programme is also supporting ‘other productivity-improving technologies’, including surgery pods, no-code development tools, e-rostering, scheduling and care planning tools, remote monitoring, digital dictation, digital front door tools, and digital mental health programmes.
The aim is to support organisations digital maturity, accelerate adoption and help scale ‘proven technologies’.
£2 million has been invested to support 14 organisations adopt extended reality technology, that includes virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality tools. This spans across areas including patient and health professional education, mental health and wellbeing, communication, physiotherapy and rehabilitation, and image guided surgery. One aim for this part of the programme is to develop evidence and insights into the technologies.
For automation tech, £7.5 million has been allocated to support 45 projects across 32 sites. The programme has in scope over 317 processes to be automated across HR, finance, recruitment, admin and clinical functions. One organisation to become an ‘NHS centre of excellence’ in this field is Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust, where its automation programme has identified over 500 viable opportunities for the NHS to automate.
Over £1.6 million has been allotted for the introduction of real time location systems at 10 NHS organisation. These systems will enable the trusts to implement or expand their use of real time location systems, including radio-frequency identification. One of the case studies for this area of the programme highlights the tech at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, who reported for their clinical engineers, the average time taken to supply a device to a ward is now down to 12 minutes.
To find out more on the programme and funding, please click here.
