The North West London Acute Provider Collaborative, made up of trusts including Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Imperial College Healthcare, London North West University, and The Hillingdon Hospitals, has published a strategy covering 2024-2027, outlining shared priorities and plans to “address complex, system-wide issues more effectively in the years ahead”.
The existing implementation of a single Oracle Cerner EPR system across all 12 hospitals within the four trusts of the collaborative is highlighted as a recent success, bringing “immediate benefits for patients whose records and information can be shared with healthcare providers across sites”. Plans to optimise the EPR over the next three years include making improvements to workflows and design, addressing processes which remain paper-based, and scaling “best practice training”.
Further, the scale of shared infrastructure across the collaborative is considered to offer “enormous innovative potential” for research and the introduction of technologies such as AI in enhancing care, developing more personalised patient experiences, and increasing staff productivity.
In three years’ time, the Collaborative shares a vision to improve patient empowerment, offering enhanced access to patient information and results, easier ways of communicating with their healthcare team, and better access to “information and support that empowers them to manage their condition”.
In terms of data, the shared vision is for partners to have access to “consistent information” across the collaborative, offering them the data required to improve services and inform decision-making, as well as improving transparency for staff.
For staff, planned enhancements include the adoption of tools to support productivity, including for managing patient flow, ambient documentation, and system-generated discharge summaries.
To achieve these results, “critical actions” identified by the strategy cover the building of “common clinical outcome, performance and efficiency strategic reporting solutions”, the standardisation of digital applications and data, and the joint procurement of solutions “wherever possible”.
The strategy also signals for “a move towards creating collaborative teams” to offer support for systems and infrastructure, for an approach to “design digital into empowering patient decision making” and improving patient experience, as well as to enhance information in shared care records for patient access, to join up with partners such as the London Care Record, and to introduce patient-facing tools to make access to information and self-management “more convenient”.
Finally, the collaborative looks to offer training and support for staff in digital literacy and the use of new digital tools and systems, to ensure that these can be used “to their fullest extent” in support of patient outcomes, efficiency, and productivity.
In the short term, the collaborative outlines “immediate next steps” as finalising its data strategy to agree priorities and approaches, establishing a shared “expert resource”, and creating a register of digital applications and systems by function.
Oversight for the strategy’s progress will be delivered by the Digital and Data Working Group and the collaborative’s Digital and Data Committee, whose responsibilities were recognised in a recent board meeting as including the assurance of strategic change programmes “to drive collaborative wide and ICS integrated improvements in the management of digital/data infrastructure”.
To read the North West London Acute Provider Collaborative strategy in full, please click here.
Digital and data in North West London
We covered the launch of the Cerner EPR at Hillingdon Hospitals at the end of last year following its go-live on 3 November, with the trust commenting it will “transform the way it works” and support its transition from using paper and multiple systems.
Earlier this year, HTN also spoke to Clare Gallagher, project manager for social prescribing in the Digital First team at NHS North West London ICB. Clare chatted with us about ongoing digital projects and programmes in NW London, as well as sharing insights into successful digital social prescribing and priorities for the future.
And in June, we reported on the opening of applications for the latest round of the CW Innovation Horizon Fellowship programme, designed to encourage staff across Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to share innovative project ideas around improving patient care and experience.
