Improving our systems
I am pleased to advise that the team are continuing to make positive forward steps in our digital transformation journey, and I’m hopeful you will have seen our Digital Capabilities Framework (DCF) updates via our programme manager Jack Gould. These updates capture the Trust’s progress against the £3.1m national investment to improve the digital maturity of our primary clinical system we use across the Trust, Rio.
Through the positive progress of the digital team and the supplier, we have now enabled GP Connect, a solution which enables staff to securely access primary care information from our community system for any active service user in their care. This has improved access to information, reduced the administrative overhead of community teams needing to call general practice receptionists and rapidly improved the quality of care and timely decision making. We have also enabled a secure click through to local blood and test results from Rio into our local acute hospital systems, again improving the productivity of our workforce and reducing the administrative burden.
In future months we are exploring our bed management processes, our electronic observations on our inpatient units and looking to improve our NHS England integrated referral portal to improve the flow and administration of primary care referrals and self-referrals to community services within MPFT.
I am also really pleased to highlight some excellent work in digitising some of our existing services. The clinical systems support team led by Shaun Allcock have reviewed a number of admin heavy and paper-based processes for our Integrated Care Co-ordination (ICC) and digitised these superbly within our clinical system. The teams have reported that this has revolutionised how they operate, and this has directly benefited the speed of correspondence and overall care for our service users. We aim to take the lessons from this work and replicate this for other services within the organisation that may be needing to spend too much time on administration or reporting that a better clinical system configuration could resolve for them. You can read more in the Health & Social Care Systems Update.
Improving our data
The data and information team are progressing several key transformation schemes at pace which is fantastic to see. Despite the daily pressures of meeting the organisation’s planned and ad-hoc reporting needs, the team have created the time and space to progress several transformation schemes. The Trust’s single contents page for all of our information needs, the “MPFT Intelligence Hub”, is accessible to all staff on our homepage to improve ease of access to data. Two transformation areas I’m particularly excited to see progress in is the automation of our Programme Management Office (PMO) dashboards and the Trust’s Quality Dashboard. Both of these projects are due to go live in the New Year and release capacity from the respective teams through reduced manual data wrangling thanks to the Power BI dashboard and automated data warehouse data feeds put into place.
In the coming year, a 12-month Data and Information Transformation Plan is being launched which allocates resources to key transformation projects, including a review of our finance data reporting and the creation of a detailed caseload management tool dashboard. We will keep the updates coming as we progress these schemes.
Working in partnership
We have been committing resources and time to working in partnership across our Integrated Care Systems within which we operate. Across Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent we have been actively involved in a system-wide market test of Electronic Patient Record (EPR) providers, scoping the feasibility of a potential single EPR for use across all NHS Provider Trusts in the county. At the current moment in time, availability of funding is precluding further progress, but we are still actively involved in discussions to see how we can better link the information sharing across our systems in the interim. Furthermore, we have been in discussions across Shropshire Community Trust, and we are exploring a way of joining together our physical health and mental health records to support better joined up care for our services in Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin.
As with any regional work, this all takes time and effort and significant budget to make happen, but I remain optimistic that we are having the right discussions in the name of improved patient care and we are building some real momentum.
National
I had the honour to both judge and present the HSJ Award for Digitising Patient Care in the 2024 awards this November. Sharing the stage with the Secretary of State for Health and Care, Wes Streeting and our very own CEO, Neil Carr was a privilege. After reviewing 20+ amazing entries and spending a day on a judging panel with some fantastic digital colleagues nationwide, I had the pleasure of announcing the winning entry for East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust and the Innovating Parkinson’s Care initiative.
Throughout my review of these multiple fantastic schemes, it was clear, that the real winners are our service users. When we build digital solutions that truly focus on patient needs and preferences, and that support improved ways of accessing and interacting with their own care, it gets results. All of the initiatives we reviewed really did focus on the service user, which is what it’s all about.
I was able to take some vital learning from the schemes I reviewed, and I was able to see that MPFT adopt some very similar approaches as we look to enhance our own service user facing systems such as our Patients Know Best NHS App portal and our service user and carer engagement feedback system in the coming months.
What next?
Across the rest of our MPFT Digital Download you will see some fantastic updates from our digital inclusion activities through our Digital Angels team, and some exciting developments from our Application Development team including our home-grown. In our next update, our first of 2025, I will provide a year-end overview of our achievements and share some of the priority areas of focus in the coming year.
Other News in this update:
For more information on what else is happening across the world of digital, please click one of the links below:
- Latest Digital Angel Update – Training and Digital poverty
- What’s new in the world of Health and Social Care Systems
- ACCIO’s Clinical Update
- Digital Innovation in Community Adult Mental Health Services
- Risks, Audits & Our People Plan
- Digital Capabilities Framework (DCF) December Update
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Martyn Perry
Chief Digital Information Officer