Mark Cubbon, group chief executive at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, shares his insights on the digital focuses at his trust in this blog for HTN, as well as MFT’s EPR journey and their efforts to tackle health inequalities.
Digital focus at MFT
I joined Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) as group chief executive in April of last year. It’s great to be back in Manchester, having started my nursing career right here 32 years ago, working in three of our hospitals.
Right now, our big focus is on the implementation of our new five-year strategy, ‘Where Excellence Meets Compassion’. A key part of this is embedding digitally enabled care across MFT. Technology and digital solutions are central to our plans, especially as we build on the successful early implementation phase of our electronic patient record system, Hive, in 2022.
One of my priorities when joining the trust was to ensure we had the right focus at board level for this agenda, not just for today, but for the future. We have some great technical and clinical talent leading our digital transformation, but we needed a dedicated member of the executive team to drive this portfolio forward, working alongside our clinicians.
We have recently welcomed David Walliker to the team as our new chief digital and information officer – he is leading our efforts to enhance our digital infrastructure, strengthen cyber security, and develop an innovative data strategy for the trust. All of this will put us in the best position to drive further improvements and evaluate emerging digital solutions which may offer benefits.
Implementing the EPR
When MFT was formed in 2017, the team describe how quickly they knew that the existing systems we inherited were not up to the task for a trust of our size and scale. We wanted to ensure that all patients had equal access to high quality care, regardless of where they were located. To do this effectively, we needed a fully integrated EPR system.
With 10 hospital sites and extensive community health services, introducing an EPR was a significant undertaking. After a lot of effort and collaboration among colleagues right across MFT, our EPR Hive went live in September 2022. We chose Hive because we believe meets our needs for patients, clinical and operational use, and of course, for research. Now, we have a single trust-wide hospital record for each patient, accessible across all our sites and services.
Although we are a big organisation, we are not an island. It’s important that we continue to work with all system partners ensuring there is appropriate connectivity between our systems, supported by appropriate data sharing agreements.
When I came on board in April 2023, Hive had been live for just over six months. What immediately impressed me was the clinical leadership of the programme and the level of governance and assurance built into the implementation. Hive had executive board-level leadership and oversight from the beginning to support with escalations and risk management, demonstrating the importance of this project to the trust.
Our approach at MFT is that Hive is clinically-led, operationally-delivered and digitally-enabled; it’s a comprehensive programme that touches every part of MFT. The fact that it is led by clinicians and a multidisciplinary team means we always keep patient care at the forefront. Transformations of this scale naturally come with challenges and take time, but we are continually working to make our digital processes and new ways of working as smooth as possible.
Improvements and benefits
Hive is definitely a ‘work in progress’, and we are aiming to realise its full benefits over the next five to 10 years. The transparency it provides supports fully informed clinical decisions, making our patients’ journeys smoother and safer. With the elimination of paper processes, patient information is now instantly and securely accessible across all sites and services.
We have also launched the MyMFT patient portal, which over 414,000 patients are now using to manage their care, access appointment details, and receive test results. We are piloting new features like appointment rescheduling and a system that offers last-minute cancellations to patients with later appointments. As we continue to develop MyMFT, we are also collaborating with NHS England to improve and expand the NHS app. The increase in total MyMFT users by over 75 percent in the past year is encouraging, and I am excited about its potential in the future.
Utilising digital to tackle health inequalities
We are also harnessing digital advancements to tackle health inequalities through a multifaceted approach, focusing on understanding and addressing the unique needs of our diverse community.
We have expanded our partnership with the National Institute of Health and Care Research and the University of Manchester to develop innovative technology solutions for better diagnosis, treatment, and care. This also includes undertaking work to understand barriers to inclusivity in commercial research.
Our Health Foundation funded Innovation Hub, in collaboration with Health Innovation Manchester and other partners, supports the adoption of technologies that improve health outcomes and tackle health inequalities of our diverse communities. We are working towards a model whereby we ensure the patient and public voice is brought into all our activity around digital innovation locally. This ensures input from patient partners who are representative of our local communities, some of which have the worst health inequalities in England.
Operationally, we are gaining insights into outpatient and urgent care data through our innovative Power BI health inequalities dashboard, allowing us to tailor our services to better meet the needs of our patients and communities. Our MyMFT patient portal is another step forward, enabling patients to self-record crucial information, which has significantly enhanced our understanding of their experiences and access to care.
Unlocking the insights that our data can provide us, to make better decisions, predictions, and plans, is central to our ambition as a trust. That includes clinical data in our EPR, operational data in our analytics platforms, research data in the secure data environment, or the array of information we will have access to in the coming months once we connect to the tools and functionality in the federated data platform.
We are also mindful of the environmental factors affecting health and have integrated air quality data into our EPR to provide personalised advice to those in areas with poor air quality. Recognising the importance of digital inclusion, we are actively training local organisations and offering work experience placements to ensure that everyone can benefit from our digital tools.
In our Hospital at Home service, we are careful to ensure that the adoption of digital enablers does not disadvantage members of our communities; we offer a range of monitoring options including those with digital devices and provide education and counselling to support all patients, including those without devices. We are committed to evaluating the impact of our digital innovations continuously, ensuring they serve to reduce health inequalities rather than exacerbate them, and we are working to overcome barriers to internet access, for example by providing free Wi-Fi and necessary devices.
In short, at MFT, we believe that digital technology should be a bridge, not a barrier, to better health for all.
Many thanks to Mark for sharing his insights.
