Shropshire Health and Wellbeing Board has published an update on progress toward Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin ICS’s digital strategy, highlighting “key accomplishments” since March 2024 including the rollout of an EPR, advancements in digital diagnostics, and progress around virtual care and remote monitoring.
One of the key areas of progress the report identifies is around leadership and collaboration, highlighting that establishing “strong digital leadership” across the ICB has been “instrumental”. In particular, it refers to CMO and digital lead roles “now in place within the ICB”, all system partners being equipped with a CIO or equivalent roles, dedicated programme leads, and a new Digital Delivery Group to offer “central oversight and coordination of digital initiatives”.
Another area of progress is digital inclusion, where the report cites the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag (RDAF) programme which identifies patients needing adjustments to use digital services, and work toward patient portal integration with the NHS app.
On local care transformation, the report shares that the Digital Social Care Records programme has “successfully met its target to engage 75 care providers over three years”; that Shropshire Council has been piloting virtual care delivery with the use of the GenieConnect platform and plans to pilot lifestyle monitoring sensors; and “significant milestones” across primary care including all GPs successfully implementing the EMIS clinical system and efforts to upgrade critical network infrastructure.
In terms of integrated care records and population health management, the report states that “implementation of the Shared Care Record through the Graphnet contract has laid a critical foundation for data-sharing across the ICS, enabling clinicians and care providers to access real -time patient information and fostering collaborative care”. A “major achievement” has also been establishing a data feed across the ICS with seamless integration into the One Health & Care Shared Care Record.
And finally, with EPR and digital diagnostics, the report outlines “substantial progress” on the rollout and integration of EPR systems, including System C Careflow EPR implementation at acute trusts, Access Group’s RIO EPR implementation at community trusts, EMIS rollout across primary care, and the rollout of the CLEO EPMA system at MPFT.
Challenges, securing sustainable funding, improving system interoperability
As well as highlighting these areas of progress, the report also outlines several challenges in realising the ambitions of the ICS’s digital strategy, including securing sustainable funding, improving system interoperability, and ensuring digital inclusivity.
Key objectives of the digital strategy include implementing frontline systems that “support safer clinical practices and establish robust digital foundations”, strengthening cybersecurity and infrastructure resilience, improving digital inclusivity, fostering system integration, addressing workforce optimisation, using digital tools to enhance care quality, and optimising staff productivity.
In order to achieve the ICS’s vision of “a digitally enabled, equitable health and care system by 2028”, the report sets out recommendations including expanding digital inclusivity and access through partnerships, digital literacy programmes, and “device distribution to underserved populations”.
The report also cites the need to focus on expanding virtual care solutions, particularly for rural and underserved populations, to help increase access and reduce pressures on hospital services. It adds that “given the decommissioning of the Docobo solution and the lack of demonstrable benefits”, the ICS needs to “reassess its approach to remote monitoring”, exploring alternative solutions and “re-prioritising investments to focus on areas where digital tools can have a proven impact on patient care”.
Other recommendations include pursuing additional funding for digitisation projects, enhancing interoperability and data integration, strengthening cybersecurity, driving engagement and adoption around the Shared Care Record, and improving digital literacy amongst the workforce. To read the report in full, please click here.
The wider trend: approaches to digital transformation and digital strategy
The month of November has seen a number of HTN panel discussions on the topic of digital transformation and digital strategy, including a recent discussion around the Darzi report and putting its findings into action to drive digital change. With a panel of experts from across the health system, we explored main takeaways, as well as what actions can be taken to realise Darzi’s ambitions, how digital can support the shift from “diagnose and treat” to “predict and prevent”, and the changes required in the short term to make this a reality.
HTN was also joined by a panel of experts from the health sector to discuss the topic of managing EHR complexity, addressing technical challenges, and achieving a balance between customisation, compliance, and scalability. Whereas in other industries “it’s not as big a deal if information is slightly out-of-date”; in health it’s absolutely essential that alerts about things like medications and results are as close to real-time as possible, Mike Hardman, principal engineer and EPR technology lead at Aire Logic said. “That’s extremely difficult in a care setting…we’re also operating in a resource-constrained environment, so we’re not a revenue generating industry that can throw more resource at a problem; we have to do it within a very restricted cost model.”
And representatives from Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and Restore Information Management joined us to discuss their digital journey, exploring how the trust transformed from a years-old dependency on paper records to a fully digital system. The programme also offered support for the trust’s wider digital transformation strategy, with digitised records to be entered into an EDRMS, which in turn would support a new EPR.
