HTN was joined for a recent interview by Joshua Camacho, business development manager for the UK & Ireland at Enovacom, a company dedicated to development software enabling the exchange and sharing of patient data for healthcare organisations.
Joshua shared insight into Enovacom’s work around digital mental health, sharing case studies from the UK context, along with his perspective on the wider digital mental health landscape in the UK and beyond, and future plans to expand the company’s portfolio in this space.
“I’ve been with Enovacom now for three years,” Joshua said, “and what makes me passionate is seeing technology being used to improve care for patients and reduce the burden for caregivers – that’s at the heart of what I do every day.”
Enovacom’s development in the healthcare space
Joshua shared that Enovacom specialises in healthcare interoperability, capturing, securing, standardising and transferring data from any system to another, as well as integrating its own solutions and providing a service around those.
Enovacom was acquired by the Orange group to become its dedicated healthcare division, with the goal of helping hospitals save time for patient care,” Joshua explained. “Since then, we’ve expanded our operations beyond France to the BENELUX, Nordics, EMEA, North America, UK & Ireland, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.”
Describing Enovacom’s offerings, Joshua referred to it as “an interoperability suite,” comprising three key software solutions: an integration engine that captures, secures, standardizes, and transmits data between systems; a medical device integration solution for collecting data from biomedical devices; and a FHIR-based data repository for storing data in standardized formats.”
“In the UK, there’s been a big push to equip every healthcare organisation with an EPR. Now that 95 percent have that in place, it’s about how you can capture data from those medical devices and put that onto the EPR. If you don’t have capabilities of capturing and automating the data in-flow, you’re essentially just transferring the use of paper from one point to another.”
Additionally, he said, with advancements in artificial intelligence we “need raw data to be analysed with machine learning; so we’ve also developed a data repository that is FHIR-based. This means that organisations, both private and public, can come into those repositories and extract the data for research or clinical purposes.”
Another important development for the company has been the acquisition of NEHS Digital, Xperis and Nomadeec, which Joshua said will help Enovacom expand its offer to “become one of the largest telemedicine providers in France and Europe”.
Supporting digital mental health care
When it comes to supporting digital mental health care, Joshua told us how the company’s first NHS clients were mental health trusts. He shared the example of Oxford Health, who Enovacom worked with to build a collaboration around its integration engine to help integrate their systems, overcoming challenges often faced for mental health trusts around the number of different organisations, clinicians and teams involved in mental health care.
“There’s a lot of work and data that comes from outside of the walls of the hospital,” Joshua said, “and our integration engine is scalable on several levels: hospital-wide, trust-wide, ICS-wide, and even on a national level.”
Enovacom is also working with a trust south of London that is using the integration engine to integrate systems with the NHS Spine, “which is more of a national level project”, he added.
Plans to improve digital mental health in the UK have been helped along, Joshua shared, by King Charles’s July 2024 speech, which called for “under financed” mental health to be “placed at the same level as the acute for funding”. This should push forward projects around remote consultation and telemedicine, he said, “because that’s one of the solutions for long waiting times and other challenges the NHS is currently facing for mental health care”.
Enovacom’s integration can support this thanks to its integration engine which can enhance integration across all levels, and its telemedicine solution can also enable cases such as teleconsultation, tele-emergency, tele-expertise and teleradiology.
Digital mental health in Oxford and Hertfordshire
Joshua next shared with us some details about Enovacom’s work with trusts including Oxford Health and Hertfordshire Partnership.
“With Oxford Health we were initially working to integrate their EPR with their ePMA system, transferring data back and forth between the two. The trust also regularly sends questionnaires to check in on patients, asking how they’re feeling, how they’re getting on with their treatment and so on. That uses the True Colours self-management system, with responses directly integrated back into the EPR.”
Outcomes of this work from Oxford Health have included 408 hours saved annually on unnecessary data entry duplication, which amounts to an estimated £9,000 saving in salaries each year. Further reported benefits include improved patient safety; and enhanced discharge processes and increased care quality to be seen from the use of the integration engine in transferring data between the trust’s EPR, pharmacy dispensing and stock control system.
“It not only saves time for clinicians, but also for patients,” Joshua noted, “because they don’t need to keep coming back to the trust to share how they’re getting on – that can now be done remotely.”
In Hertfordshire, Joshua highlighted the work being done around clinical applications like an e-observations app used to record patient details which are then transferred directly to the EPR. “There are a lot of use cases of trusts developing their own power apps,” he said, “and the way that you can make those apps communicate with a trust’s central health information system is via the integration engine.”
In line with Hertfordshire Partnership’s digital strategy, the trust was focused on consolidating information from multiple clinical systems into a single data repository, selecting Enovacom’s integration engine after a market analysis and testing process which found it to integrate “perfectly” with the trust’s clinical data repository, based on FHIR.
The use of the integration engine at the trust means that patient data can be shared more easily with other healthcare organisations within the region, ensuring everyone has access to the Shared Care Record. Health professionals can perform a search on the My Care Record portal, which offers a single version of the truth, allowing patient records to be extracted in full without needing data extract routines to be built from multiple clinical systems.
“All of the data is stored in our repository,” Joshua said, “and it gets sent to the Cerner IHE, allowing other organisations outside of the trust to actually gain access to that data as well.”
In another NHS trust, integration is ongoing around Patients Know Best (PKB), sending data from the EPR into PKB and having those data lakes “which can also be used for research purposes further down the road”.
Impacts, benefits, and the wider digital mental health landscape
In terms of impact and outcomes for the workforce, Joshua said: “It’s all about saving time for caregivers, so that they have more time to care; but it’s also about enabling those remote services which offer a range of practical benefits for patients and the workforce alike.”
In France, a lot of work has been done around driving digital mental health services, he continued, “centralising it on a national level, with the government launching the Ma Santé initiative in 2022, which encourages the use of telemedicine, remote monitoring, and the use of e-health apps”.
Estimating that France is ahead of the UK in these conversations around remote monitoring for mental health, Joshua continued: “I think that is where the UK can push forward in the use of those e-health apps and technologies around telemedicine to enable remote monitoring on a greater scale.”
Another area France is doing well in is telepsychiatry, according to Joshua, as during the COVID pandemic the government put a platform in place so that everyone, following a recommendation from their local GP, could benefit from psychiatric services remotely. This service was also made free for young people.
Looking to what the future has to offer for Enovacom, Joshua talked about plans to become “an interoperability leader in the digital mental health space”, using the integration engine to help trusts “boost their own technological capacity and enable themselves to have projects covering not only local, but also regional and national projects for mental health”.
The company is also preparing to enter the telemedicine market in the UK with its newly-acquired software solution, with a view to bringing mental health services to as many people as possible.
Enovacom will be hosting an upcoming webinar on digital mental health, looking specifically at how interoperability can help to support projects in this space, and highlighting key features from its digital mental health platform. The webinar is scheduled for November; to register, please click here.
Many thanks to Joshua for taking the time to chat.
