So what are some of the digital projects and programmes happening across the four ICSs in the North East and Yorkshire?

In Humber and North Yorkshire, growing the shared care record is a major programme of work. It has been connected with acute and mental health trusts and three of the ICS’s local authorities, and GP Connect information has been linked in. Between October 2021 and 2022, “significant progress” was made, with more than 30 projects supporting the shared care record’s development and expansion, including the sharing of key data sets such as the end-of-life care record. “We have made great progress in establishing how we work with our partner organisations, the pace at which we can work, and how we support them in onboarding, ensuring they have appropriate resources and skills in-house,” the partnership states.

The strategy also shares Humber and North Yorkshire’s work around green priorities through digital means; they are using electronic platforms for meetings, relying more on electronic communications between partners to reduce printing, and promoting telephone and video conferencing for patient appointments where appropriate. In addition, the ICS notes that more partner organisations are moving IT infrastructure to the cloud; working from home is supported where possible to reduce the carbon footprint; and there is focus on asset optimisation and re-use.

When the digital strategy for North East and North Cumbria ICS was published, ICS digital leads commented: “Over recent years we have been laying down the solid foundations on which to build these digital services – to help us meet both the technical challenge of linking complex systems together, putting in the right infrastructure, standards and security measures.”

Professor Graham Evans, executive chief digital officer for the ICS, joined HTN a year after the strategy’s publication to share an update. He highlighted the development of their patient engagement platform, in its final stages at the time, and also shared their work developing a business case for a Trusted Research and Evaluation Environment.

On cyber security, partners across the ICS have worked together to implement a regional Cyber Response Approach. This approach aims to ensure that all organisations follow an appropriate methodology in the face of cyber risks, and places equal focus on people, processes and technology.

With regards to new ways of working, the ICS adds that they have delivered a range of digital technologies designed to support their workforce to function in more agile ways, and successfully secured and channelled funding to organisations within the region so that they can improve their digital maturity.

West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, meanwhile, shares a “number of existing mechanisms to share data for care delivery”, including the shared care record covering primary care and some community and acute care, the Leeds Care Record, and a single shared care record between two of their trusts.

We interviewed Andy Webster and Georgie Duncan from Leeds Teaching Hospitals on the Leeds Care Record here.

On population empowerment, the ICS shares how it is providing their population with access to health and social care held about them, and allowing them to contribute to this data. It is hoped that this will support self-management and lead to the development of richer data centred around each individual.

In terms of supporting the workforce, the partnership has started to implement roaming WiFi services across the region to help the workforce in health and care locations outside of their own organisation. The document adds: “The migration to NHSmail for the majority of our organisations has provided a single email contact directory to make communication easier. Implementation of Microsoft Teams has enabled instant messaging and meeting facilities and support for multi-disciplinary team collaboration.”

Another key aspect of West Yorkshire’s work focuses on research and innovation. Their strategy shares the collaborative relationships the ICS has been building, with working relationships established with organisations such as Yorkshire and Humber AHSN, the Leeds Academic Health Partnership, the Yorkshire and Humber Applied Research Collaborative, and the Bradford Institute of Health Research.

A recent edition of our podcast, HTN Let’s Talk, featured Stephen Blackburn and Leonardo Tantari from West Yorkshire ICB and Leeds City Council. They discussed a variety of digital projects in the area, including the smart cities programme which explores “how we utilise, for example, Internet of Things technology to collect data in real time, and then work that data in innovative ways.”

On a similar note, South Yorkshire ICS shines a spotlight on their Innovation Hub, which aims to “identify and address unmet clinical and non-clinical needs across the ICS, inclusive of all specialities, disciplines and health areas.” The Hub shares a range of case studies providing insight into some of the digital work undertaken across South Yorkshire – one case study describes a project to provide remote treatment for stroke patients, for example; another shares the development of digital care homes; another shares a project designed to offset digital exclusion by developing a ‘clean digital clinic’ for people who might not have access to technologies and/or the skills required to use the tech.

In recent HTN news, last week we heard from Richard Billam, deputy director of ICT at Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, on how the trust has leveraged the Microsoft national tenant and implemented a digital solution to enable clinicians to use familiar tech for virtual consultations. Richard said: “Within two years we had rolled out a new EPR, scanned electronic patient notes and implemented electronic prescribing. The trust was absolutely amazing for taking all that on. But the clinical teams, although they adopted the technologies really well, were finding it tiring to work with these processes with their different systems and different requirements…. Our goal was to ensure that we had something that was completely adoptable by the centre. Our user experience would just be a case of going into Teams, seeing the solution, and not having to do any additional work.” 

In December, we were joined by James Rawlinson, chief information officer at South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw ICS and director of informatics at The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust, for a discussion on Rotherham’s approach to waitlist validation. James described how the digital team worked in collaboration with trust’s strategy and planning team as well as service managers to map out a solution, which led to a validation method based around customised text messaging.