Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GST) has published a new strategy running to 2030, highlighting expectations around the potential offered by the next decade of digital advancements and sharing plans around EPR optimisation, attracting and funding healthcare innovation, and utilising artificial intelligence and and automation responsibly.
On the potential of digital, GST highlights the recent launch of a shared EPR alongside King’s College Hospital and shares expectations that this, in line with “exponential growth” around automation, artificial intelligence and computing, will provide “significant opportunities” for service and patient relationship transformation.
The trust shares how extensive engagement has been undertaken over the past 18 months to ensure that the strategy reflects user needs; in particular, feedback indicated a need to keep a focus on “getting the basics right” such as ensuring reliable digital infrastructure; and a desire to find new ways to scale innovation and improve use of data and analytics.
The strategy lays out specific updates and plans around GST’s EPR, pledging to “concentrate on rapidly delivering the benefits” of the system for patients and for staff, and to use the EPR to drive integrated, data-enabled care across all services. Planned benefits around optimised use of the EPR are shared, such as automated alerts and reminders to improve safety and ensure timely interventions; transformed communication between services and teams; advanced analytics to enable “in-depth” analysis of clinical data; and delivery of population health initiatives, enabled by analysis of data at aggregate level. GST also commits to ongoing training and support for staff around the EPR.
Another strategic priority set out in the strategy revolves around innovating for a better future. Key deliverables include driving ambition as a Academic Health Sciences Centre specialising in data sciences, advanced therapies and population health; becoming a “responsible pioneer” of automation an AI, with focus on ethical delivery designed to support local communities; and becoming “one of the most innovation friendly health systems in the country” to attract “the brightest and best innovators to design and deploy mid-21st century healthcare solutions”.
On this last point, GST shares how it seeks to attract, accelerate and fund healthcare innovators and health-tech start-ups by improving accessibility of portfolio careers for entrepreneurs; reforming the approach to intellectual property; and expanding the scale and reach of KHP Ventures, the trust’s health-tech investment fund.
GST pledges to support the use of future tech in a number of areas, namely through the leading of a new health tech research centre alongside King’s College London focusing on cardiovascular disease; and by developing the London AI Centre for Value Based Healthcare, designed to support safe, ethical use of AI and automation. The trust will also support an initiative run by The Royal Brompton and Harefield Charity’s that aims to encourage innovation in heart, lung and critical care medicine and surgery, and will contribute to national policy through the Responsible AI group.
In particular, GST states: “We do not underestimate the ethical and technical challenges that may be involved, for example in the application of emergent artificial intelligence or gene and cell therapies.” Close work with patients and staff is required, the trust continues, along with collaboration with ethicists, regulators and other partners to tackle these issues and ensure responsible, safe research and innovation.
With regards to the use of data for research, GST commits to responsible use of clinical data to improve population health, and shares an ambition to “play a leading role in the national health data research agenda through links with Health Data Research UK” and by utilising opportunities provided by the EPR.
Another focus within the strategy is that of improving population health; here, a strategic objective is to empower patients to take greater control of their own health and care, including through use of the MyChart patient portal and MyChart app. To combat digital exclusion, non-digital channels will also be maintained.
This work will also see GST using tech and data to predict and prevent disease, as well as to personalise care. The strategy highlights the trust’s new Population Health Hub, which will use data to help focus on understanding healthcare needs, reducing inequity, increasing responsiveness of services, enabling preventative care, and addressing local health inequalities including digital exclusion.
On delivering healthcare excellence, GST turns its attention to quality improvement and states that the trust will use its “comprehensive” new quality management system to “prioritise, deliver, measure and embed continuous improvement throughout the organisation, doing so across all domains of healthcare quality”. This is to be based on accessible data and intelligence as well as international best practice. Another aim in this area is to improve productivity by identifying opportunities to use data from the trust’s EPR along with nationally-collected data in the Model Health System and Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) to enable the identification of further opportunities to improve consistency and efficiency.
With key priority of “valuing all of our people”, GST notes plans to support flexible working including through development of innovative working patterns, and pledges to respond to new technology in order to support the delivery of “better, faster, fairer healthcare” with “better ways of working”. The strategy states that staff will be supported to take advantage of new opportunities including training to make sure that they “are equipped to thrive in the new digital healthcare environment”. In particular, this will see GST train staff on the effective utilisation of big data, bioinformatics, machine learning, AI, and natural language processing.
Looking to partnership working, the strategy shares how GST is building new collaborations with a view to working jointly on service changes, including collaborating with The Royal Marsden, Great Ormond Street Hospital and the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Such collaborations focus on “finding new ways to improve NHS services”, GST states, and will include work around new digital innovations.
Moving on to plans to modernise infrastructure, the trust shares a key aim to “significantly improve” resilience, reliability and user experience of digital estate as well as physical estate, and to invest in technologies to support automation and AI, gene and cell diagnostics and therapies, advanced clinical imaging and robotic surgery. Additionally, the strategy highlights how GST plans a “carefully balanced blend” of on-premises and cloud hosting to ensure resilience and to underpin data and analytics capabilities.
Finally, GST acknowledges that its strategy is underpinned by strategies within each of its four clinical groups, and shares insight into priorities and service innovation plans within each. Within the cancer and surgery clinical group, there are plans to embrace new technology and digital innovation in order to improve experiences and outcomes for patients and colleagues; and to build on GST’s current role as a large robotic surgery provider to become a European centre of excellence in robotics along with standing “at the forefront of digital technology and AI in surgery in the UK”. The heart, lung and critical care clinical group shares plans to develop its digital health programme, including through improved data quality and analytics; and the integrated and specialist medicine clinical group
The trust has also produced a video to illustrate plans laid out in the strategy.
Strategies: the wider trend
Earlier in October, we took a look at Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust’s first digital strategy, which sets out plans up to 2030 for the future of digital within the organisation in areas in areas including self-care, remote monitoring and access to records.
Last month, we explored Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s maternity service strategy for 2024-2029, highlighting innovation and technology as key enablers to develop the service and noting plans to launch a new maternity end-to-end electronic patient record in 2025.
September also saw HTN examine the new strategy from The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust, which sets out digital and data as one of nine “essential focus areas”.
And from NHSE, we reported on the strategy detailing the primary care implementation of the NHS patient safety plans, noting the role of digital and data in areas such as automatically flagging patient safety issues to support reliability, and supporting clinical decision-making by digitally embedding diagnosis advice and safety netting.
