In the past few years, the number of changes in the healthcare system has been acute, from health ministers, a funding crisis, to the Cost-of-Living and five-year forward views.
On 14 November, digital health professionals from the NHS Trust and Imprivata participated in an online webinar to address how the NHS is trying to streamline and enable a more efficient NHS healthcare system and how digital systems could help manage increasingly difficult challenges and demand which is burdening the NHS breaking point.
In years prior and in 2022, the crises facing the NHS have included a carousel of prime ministers, a lack of funding and workforce, the cost of living and a new Health Act, culminating in a dysfunctional system for patients accessing medical records and treatment and raises security concerns over the handling of personal data.
Introduced on 1 July 2022, 42 Integrated Care Systems were formally established across England under the Health and Care Act 2022 to improve coordinated and connected healthcare across the NHS.
Andy Wilcox, Senior Solutions Marketing & Enablement Manager, at Imprivata opened the discussion, saying: “It feels like (ICS’ and ICU’s) will be very beneficial in the future, but right in the short term it’s obviously been very disruptive”.
Digital identity fits into the strategy for substantially enhancing for the efficiency of everyday NHS systems and operations to deliver fast access to medical information, improve security and ensure compliance.
The discussion breaks down what any healthcare professionals means by access, enabling all clinicians, other professionals in the organisation and patients can have access to medical information in a secure end-to-end system.
Systems which used to be used by individual hospitals have slowly moved to national systems and now several hospital may or may not be sharing information using different login portals in the ICP modal.
The evolution of healthcare delivery aims to facilitate multi-agency partnerships spanning the NHS, local and national government and social enterprises and reimagine how we can achieve an open communication channel between patients and clinicians, without compromising security and data privacy. As different agencies and organisations need access to the same patient informations, it is essential that security and privacy frameworks are adhered to.
The webinar preempts the HLTH conference, which will give digital health providers a forum this week to explore growth in compliant digital healthcare systems were consumer-facing technologies and digital health companies are thriving.
A recent report from Accenture and AdvaMed found that the medical technology industry is being shaped by digital health and customers’ expectations around secure data access and digital identity management.
Tim Durst, Managing Director at Accenture said: “Healthcare is at a crossroads, facing unprecedented pressure and disruption — including affordability challenges, shifting patient expectations, and an increasing deluge of health data”.
