2018 was a pivotal year for digital health technologies with major headlines of industry disruption dominating the news agenda.
As we enter 2019, we’ve asked the leaders and innovators of the industry to look forward, and share their new year’s resolutions for 2019. They reveal the technologies they’re most excited about, the biggest challenges currently facing health tech, and those they see having the biggest impact on the industry.
Intro
Today we hear from Raj Modi, Senior Director, Healthcare Innovation EMEA at Oracle. With over 15 years’ experience in strategy and transformation consulting, he has worked with a range of clients such as the UK National Health Service, BUPA, InHealth, Novo Nordisk and the Mayor of London.
Here’s what he has to say…
The immediate challenge for services
“Technology and innovation are pivotal to shifting the outcomes to cost ratio for health services.
The good news is this technology is available and ready to use now – and already solving similar problems in other industries.
The immediate challenge for services is serving patients with long term problems – these make up 30% of the population but account for 70% of the spend. Moreover, people with long term conditions do not want fragmented care, delivered by multiple health professionals across different organisations.”
Addressing challenges head on in 2019
“To address these challenges requires ruthless focus on the person, their needs and integrate care services around these needs.
This requires a one ecosystem, integrated approach utilising the benefits of digital care to develop patient centric journeys.
To turn these principles and ideas into reality requires services to be designed around the user and their needs. This requires a structured agile approach to transformation utilising a cross-functional team – doctors, nurses, managers, data analysts and information technology (together with patients).”
The value of this is that the process is grounded in real life patient stories and experience and the diversity of perspectives gives a rich understanding of the trade offs at each point.
We need to recognise that transformation requires taking changing the cultural and behavioural DNA and that only happens when there is buy-in and ownership at the start of the process.
Examples of innovation in the NHS include:
- Developing a community based pathway for patients with Diabetes and at risk of amputations in Greater Manchester (Manchester Amputation Reduction Service)
- Transforming maternity and child care at West Sussex STP (Family Assist)
- Developing Digital Cancer Care services at Royal Marsden
- End-to-end digital care pathways for mental health UK wide (Turning Point)
“Despite the multitude of personas and clinical pathways – there is a need to serve these capabilities with one architectural blueprint.”
Setting the foundations for technology
“The NHS needs to build the right foundations for technology. Key fundamentals to this are interoperability and security, which are critical in planning a data strategy and management framework in any organisation, but particularly one as complex and mission critical as the NHS. Furthermore, the application of standardisation across use cases is also a vital component.”
There are some excellent examples of wholesale transformation internationally – for example look at Australia which has implemented a shared care record for every citizen. It is seeing 57% increase in clinician productivity!