Seven Integrated Care Systems roll out ORCHA across the South West
Region empowers 5.6 million citizens with safe digital health and save 30% in costs
Background
Our Dorset is a partnership of health and social care organisations working together to help its 750,000 residents. Similar to many regions, Dorset is facing significant workforce gaps in nearly every area of care and its population is ageing, leading to more long-term conditions and a growing demand on its services.
To address this challenge, the ICS first aimed to lay solid foundations for public-facing digital health, with health apps as a key building block.
Our Dorset commissioned ORCHA to assess digital health products, developing a formulary of these products for priority areas. This formulary was used to build a bespoke health app library, empowering the workforce to signpost and prescribe digital health tools. With ORCHA, Our Dorset delivered a programme that mitigated risk and assured clinical teams they are recommending safe apps to enable accelerated access to services from home.
The benefits of rolling out the system across the South West were clear, and Transformation Boards universally agreed that the solution would particularly add real value in the prevention space, easing pressure on the system.
Solution
The seven ICSs commissioned ORCHA to manage digital health assessment and distribution across the South West. All seven ICSs would collectively benefit from ORCHA’s governance and assessments, enabling patients and the system to adopt relevant, safe and innovative technologies more quickly.
Each ICS worked with ORCHA to build its own personalised app library, giving professionals and the public access to assessed apps. To assist, Our Dorset gave examples of areas where they have seen good traction. To aid workforce adoption, training was rolled out across a range of cohorts, giving staff the confidence to recommend digital first.
Results
The seven ICSs now have a system-wide approach and single point of access to a wide range of digital health tools across long-term condition management, wellbeing, screening and diagnostics.
Commissioning and managing the system across seven ICS areas is delivering consistency and cost savings. Comparing the roll-out to a single organisation, the group has reduced costs by thirty per cent.
Since launching its programme, Our Dorset has seen significant impact, with almost 2283 apps recommended by 12th March 2021 and 56% of those downloaded. As they prepare to launch their libraries, the other six ICSs across the South West will be looking to achieve similar results.
The roll-out has put in place the coordination needed to assure that the digital health technologies recommended by a team of 2,800 professionals across almost 50 organisations within the 7 ICSs consistently meets standards and pinpoints the best solution for every patient, in the 5.6 million population it serves.
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