News

NHS National Services Scotland plans “once for Scotland” digital heart failure system

NHS National Services Scotland has published a prior information notice for the development of a “once for Scotland” digital heart failure system, with the aim of any potential project to adopt technology capable of displaying, capturing and collating relevant clinical information to “bring the benefits of enhanced vetting, investigation and diagnostic decision-making”.

The digital product would need to provide an active “near real-time” dashboard to show patients who have been referred with suspected heart failure and are awaiting diagnosis, which NHS National Services Scotland hopes will “greatly enhance the opportunity” for clinicians to stratify risk and determine need by undertaking active clinical referral triage, enabling them to determine the urgency of face-to-face review and initiating up-front treatment ahead of formal diagnosis where appropriate. In addition, the dashboard would be required to display patients newly diagnosed with heart failure who are awaiting initiation of core drug therapies.

The notice highlights intention to begin early market engagement, with interested suppliers asked to note interest by submitting a questionnaire by 5 February at 12pm.

The questionnaire and full details can be found here.

Earlier this month, Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust published a tender for EPR programme data migration and integration services, aiming to support implementation of the trust’s Epic programme.

In other news from Scotland, last week we covered NHS Education for Scotland’s announcement of “paperless placements” for nursing students at the University of Dundee, through the development of a digital app designed to enable students to record learning progress and achievements electronically and as such replace the current 350-page paper documents.

Also in January, we shared how Scotland Excel has opened an opportunity for tech-enabled care goods and services on behalf of the 32 local authorities in Scotland, with the estimated total value of the framework is £25 million.