1. How can information and technology support
integrated care?
ISCG Open House, 21 January 2014
Paul Rice, Head of Technology Strategy, NHS England
Charlotte Buckley, Deputy Director, People
Communities and Local Government DH
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2. Introductions and context

3. Today’s workshop
• Set out the vision and context to the integrated
digital care programme
• Outline the work on integrated digital care that is
currently underway
• Group discussion about the goals of the programme,
best practice, challenges and the shape of the future
programme
• Summary

4. What is our goal?
•
•
•
•
In the future, we want to see much more joint working across health and social
care, with services wrapped around the user and with the citizen at the very heart
of the system.
To do this we are investing in technology and creating information systems that
help professionals and individuals share information about their health and care
more easily.
We are building a programme around what people have told us that they want:
– Better co-ordinated and joined up services, so service users only need to tell
their story once and all professionals caring for the individual are fully
informed
– Access to their records, in a user friendly format, so they are more in control
of their care
– When individuals move or a new team is in place there is a smooth transition
– There is safer, higher quality care
– Innovation and continuous improvement in service delivery
Our ambitions are not about introducing more technology for technologies sake
but about improving the organisation and delivery of care to improve outcomes,
using technology as one of the means to achieve this

5. The Drivers of Change
•
Integration – Better Value Fund and Pioneers accelerating joint working and new
models of care to deliver better outcomes to individuals and manage pressures on
services better
•
Safer Hospitals Safer Wards/Integrated Care Technology Fund - providing
investment to increase the underpinning information technology capability in
health and social care and to support increased movement of information
between systems - interoperability
•
Personalisation – increasingly putting the citizen at the heart of the system, in
control of their health and care
•
Quality and Outcomes – seeking continuous improvement in the quality and
experience of health and care
•
Prevention – exploring ways to reconfigure services to manage increasing demand
better
•
Care Bill – delivering the most significant change in the legal framework, funding
and provision of adult social care for over 50 years

6. What are our foundations?
•
The quality of information captured in the systems that support delivery of care in
primary care (predominantly GP practices) is good. There is more that can be done
to ensure that the most important items of information can be shared more easily
and accessed by professionals/users/carers when and where this matters for
decision making.
•
Much of the information that is captured in secondary care (predominantly
hospitals) is captured still on paper records that make the sharing of that
information within hospitals and beyond significantly more difficult and
incomplete. Much of the information also captured to support the delivery of care
within hospitals is condition or context specific and we need to support treatment
and care of the whole person in control.
•
Much of the information captured in social care is in information systems that also
don’t easily enable sharing or is for particular purposes.
•
Capturing an individuals NHS number at the point of care provides assurance that
the information being shared between professionals, users and carers relates to
the same person.
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7. What are our challenges?
•
There are technical barriers to the movement of information between systems but
these are surmountable
•
The small and medium enterprise sector has struggled for market share when they
offer innovative and dynamic approaches to the capture/presentation of information
•
The informatics leadership community has been undervalued and marginalised with
scare skills in high demand in other sectors
•
The public sector has lacked commercial expertise to specify and procure solutions
to meets its requirements with respect to information technology
•
The clinical and professional leadership community has not always understood and
championed the part that information technology can play in improving care and
transforming business processes
•
Where information technology has underpinned innovation the lessons learnt have
not been captured nor best practice adopted at scale and pace elsewhere
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8. Areas for discussion
Do you agree with our
vision?
Questions for
discussion
Have you experience of
good integrated care?
Why was it good? What
role did information and
technology play?
Have we identified the
key challenges/
blockages that currently
mean information is not
being captured, shared
and used?
Where should the focus
of our efforts be to
address these
challenges? Any quick
but sustainable
solutions?

9. Group discussion

10. Summary and thanks