Humber Health Partnership has shared plans to build a virtual hospital, enabling system partners to refer into virtual pathways, as part of its new digital strategy for 2025 – 2028. The partnership also focuses on digital for productivity, building a robust and interoperable digital foundation, digital inclusion, and the effective use of data for decision-making.
Setting out the case for change, the partnership shares outcomes from engagement with over 600 staff members which identified four key themes: performance, reliability and resilience, duplication, and lack of integration. Time is wasted waiting for equipment to load, staff cannot rely on current tech to work consistently, there is a lack of unified digital governance, duplication and variation is “prolific”, and a lack of integration and multiple systems mean data has to be inputted multiple times.
One of the Humber Health missions to 2028 is to build a virtual hospital, with objectives around making virtual care an integrated part of the clinical model and enabling more effective collaboration across the region. Measures of success relate to the number of virtual beds and clinics provided, the number of virtual patient episodes provided, and the provision of “full virtual pathways” for partners to refer into.
Being a leader in automation and the application of AI forms part of the strategy, aiming to support productivity, improve quality and safety, and enable financial sustainability, it states. To measure impact, the number of processes automated will be tracked, along with the number of days of productivity saved through each application, and associated improvements in quality and safety.
Six objectives make up the partnership’s mission to build robust, secure and interoperable digital foundations. These look to continuous improvement of the digital estate, accessibility of systems from anywhere, a single digital estate, doing things once, cyber resilience, and control over contracts and renewals. “Where we can share digital services with other providers for proven mutual benefit, we should,” the partnership shares regarding collaboration. “We do not hold the monopoly on good ideas, and we should ‘steal with pride’ from the best where we can.”
A dashboard has been developed to track digital service performance, and the number of legacy operating systems will also be monitored, as well as the results of user satisfaction surveys on digital system performance. Duplicate contracts for common capabilities will be removed, an increasing number of systems, software, and hardware products will be delivered under a single ICS-wide agreement, and cyber resilience will be tracked through the DSPT.
Elsewhere, considerations are made for improving the use of data to drive decision-making and to plan for the future, for digital inclusion, maintaining user-led design in systems and software, and providing equity of access to patients, people, and partners. A single data warehouse enabling real-time reporting on key metrics will be delivered, and the partnership will look to user satisfaction surveys and feedback to provide insight on access and performance.
The focus in year one will be on design work covering key enablers of long-term success, including the implementation of a “more sustainable” digital governance regime encompassing all group activity, and building a “comprehensive overview of digital risks, investment and procurement, as well as opportunities for optimisation”. A clinically led forum for digital innovation is planned to help innovation from ward level and allow new ideas to be prioritised for investment. A business case is also to be prepared for a programme of work to improve digital foundations, covering key initiatives such as the move to the cloud.
Collaboration and partnership working from across the NHS
Humber and North Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, covering four acute trusts, has contracted Patients Know Best for a digital patient portal to March 2027. The programme will span York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust, Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, and Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Arcturis, becoming part of Arcturis’ Real-World Data Network, a network providing real-time access to “diverse and enriched” health data representative of the UK population. The network, approved by the Health Research Authority, brings together anonymised data including medications, lab tests, pathology reports, and clinical notes, along with other unstructured data, into disease specific datasets, which are then used to generate precision insights to inform drug development.
King’s Health Partners, a partnership between Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital, South London and Maudsley, and King’s College London, has published a strategy to 2030 built around the three strategic priorities of delivering personalised health, improving population health, and accelerating digital health. Setting out to connect academia with healthcare and industry, the partnership commits to accelerating innovation from ideation to validation, with an operating model based around bringing together those whose collaboration has the potential to drive transformational change for patients and the system as a whole.
