Delegates from across the country flocked to London’s Excel Centre for the first time since Covid to hear a range of speakers stress the importance of learning and enhancing the digital technological advances learnt from the pandemic. Our Communications and Engagement Manager Tony McDougal reports
Huge advances made in data analysis and technology from the Covid pandemic must be taken forward in the new Integrated Care Systems, ensuring both health and care settings benefit from learnings.
Ming Tang, NHS England chief data officer, spoke of the huge benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that had been developed during thepandemic. They were helping the NHS explore potential future benefits to:
- Better manage population health
- Tackle healthcare inequalities
- Improve workforce efficiency
- Improve care pathways
- Improve diagnosis
- Enable effective use of monitoring and self-help technology
- Explore the latest health and care applications
Covid, with its 22m positive cases in the UK and 858,000 hospitalisations, had been a catalyst for change prompting a real drive to join up data and provide data insights: “It has been a real change in the way we work and we want to build on that,” she said.
Information was currently being used as a forecasting tool for A+E admissions. The data provides a forecast up to three weeks in advance for patients admitted to hospitals, informing decisions on scheduling elective care activity to optimise capacity. This could help drive down the enormous waiting list for elective care.
Data was also being used to set up a patient tracking tool for local health and social care multi-disciplinary teams to manage patients through the discharge process and understand where discharges are being blocked, why and who is responsible.
Ms Tang said a pilot led by Hartlepool Borough Council with support from Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council and NHS North Tees and Hartlepool, would hopefully be rolled out nationally soon.
And the data had also helped set up a vaccine equality tool to ensure that lower income people from different ethnic minorities, who were often working 24/7, were reached so that they could be given Covid vaccines.
Ms Tang said she hoped the creation of Integrated Care Boards would see the benefits of AI and ML across both health and care setting, adding that the NHS was keen to create space for local systems to work collaboratively and do what was best for their local communities.
International
Bleddyn Rees, chairman of the Digital Health Society, said technology had promised radical change for a long time but had under-delivered.
Rees said huge advances had been made, not only in the political sphere, where the United Nations were now regularly talking about health issues, but in everyday wearables and apps that were changing people’s lifestyles, ensuring they ate better and prevented illness.
The days of the Industrial Age, where healthcare was concentrated in hospitals and dealing with end-of-life care with no self-help, had been replaced by the connected consumer that lives in a connected home inside a smart city.
But Rees pointed out that healthcare in the UK was still struggling with the pace of change, while other industries, including telecoms, automotive, IT, insurance, energy and marine were often leading the way in creating disruptive technology linked to sensors.
He cited Shell’s remote health strategy as an example. With the energy company having many staff working in the developing world, they decided in 2004 to provide employees with a satellite brief case and Google glasses and in the event of injury they were able to link into a treatment hospital in Germany.
In Wales, Pfizer Oncology and IBM Watson have developed the world’s first artificial intelligence enabled virtual assistant, RiTTA, trained in oncology to proof of concept. RiTTA is currently trained to answer a small number of questions that could range from breast cancer, practical admin or definitions. This followed concerns that patients, carers and their families often struggled to access helpful, high quality information to support their choices and decisions.
Countries such as Estonia, which had thrown-off the shackles of Soviet Union IT, were leading the way in patient record interactions thanks to the use of blockchain but it has taken them 20 years. With the UK having a legacy system, Rees admitted there was no quick fix for the NHS.
“We must maximise health data to develop and improve services,” adding that not enough was being done to tell people of the benefits of data: “We do not give enough example why its valuable – what benefits there are to them, their children and grand-children of health data. That is very important.”
Learning Systems
James Mountford, NHS England and NHS Improvement Director of Improvement Strategy, said it was vital to give staff a voice, adding that the last time he had been at the Excel Centre was at the beginning of the pandemic when a Nightingale Hospital was being constructed.
Mountford said 20% of staff working in the Nightingale had never worked in healthcare – some were Easy Jet pilots and staff – and many were in roles they were totally unaccustomed to working. “We had to learn our way through things….to ensure we protected London and saved lives. Data was absolutely crucial and in the early weeks was coming in from a huge range of source – from North Italy and Spain where Covid cases were rocketing to twitter feeds.
“But data is only as good as the decisions you take, so we had to continually test, review and learn. Each day we held a meeting at 4pm to say “what have we learnt, what are we doing tomorrow, what don’t we know and what are we going to find out?”
One of the areas of learning was the surprise that while non-Irish, non-British people were failing to get vaccinated. It was proving very difficult to get through to Poles and Lithuanians, so we need to change our approach and reach out to community leaders to ensure they had the information in their respective languages. Target, fix, improve, change strategies were key and these need to be passed down to the new Integrated Care Systems, he added.
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