A new digital service designed to provide a central platform for Welsh Health Boards to allocate places for routine NHS dental treatment is being piloted at Powys Teaching Health Board.
The Dental Access Portal aims to tackle “significant variation” between Health Board allocation of NHS dentist places, which reportedly brings challenges in measuring the “true level of demand” on a local and national level.
The portal has been designed and built by Digital Health and Care Wales, ahead of a national roll-out later in the year. Digital Health and Care Wales notes that national use will help to provide a clearer picture of the scale of demand for NHS dental services in Wales, and shares hopes that it will make access to routine NHS dental care “simpler and fairer for everyone”.
The pilot sees people in Powys who are already on a Health Board dental waiting list automatically added to the portal and prioritised based on when they joined the existing list. New patients will be invited to apply for the portal, with all patients provided with the opportunity to opt out and those without digital access able to contact a dental helpline via phone.
Wales in the spotlight
In other news from Digital Health and Care Wales, a contract notice was recently issued for a Network as a Service (NasS) solution worth in excess of £2 million, designed to enable the department to “strategically interconnect its physical datacenter estate, public cloud platforms, and consumer base using a resilient underlay/transit network”.
We also recently reported plans from Digital Health and Care Wales to procure a new commercial, off-the-shelf digital maternity solution for NHS Wales, with the functionality to support a shared maternity record and notes and supported by a service management regime.
HTN reported how NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership Procurement Services published a prior information notice seeking expressions of interest from industry partners to help shape a “comprehensive” commercialisation strategy and delivery model for Wales, aiming to help realise commercial value from NHS innovation activities.
We noted plans from Digital Health and Care Wales to procure a software solution to extract patient data from GP systems for secondary uses and direct care purposes.
And in the summer we took a look at the organisational strategy from Digital Health and Care Wales running until 2030 and framed around five key missions: to provide a platform for enabling digital transformation, to deliver high quality digital products and services, to expand the digital health and care record and the use of digital to improve healthcare, to drive better values and outcomes through innovation, and to be a trusted strategic partner and a high quality, inclusive and ambitious organisation.
Digital and dentistry: the wider trend
Earlier in the year we examined the plan to “recover and reform” dentistry from The Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England, which set out plans to prevent poor oral health, boost access and activity, and support and develop the dental workforce, with digital means noted to play a role in sharing information for patients on increased access.
Previously, we explored a platform which allows an AI model to recognise abnormalities in anatomical structures, developed by King’s College London and the University of Surrey in collaboration with Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust and Oral Health Foundation, with the project aiming to “provide a one-stop solution to both collect and annotate dental radiographs and assist with disease diagnoses”.
