Barry Frostick, CDIO, and Ronan Fenton, Medical Director, at Mid and South Essex ICS talk with NHE Lead Journalist, Louis Morris on the importance of data in elective recovery and the future of healthcare.
As the NHS gets to grips with the crippling backlog, the health service is reflecting on some of the deficiencies highlighted by the pandemic and the lessons learnt. This white paper talks to some of Mid and South Essex’s foremost health professionals to discuss how the NHS can solve their elective recovery problems.
Dawn of the Integrated Care Systems
With the dawn of integrated care systems on the 1 of July a new era was ushered in. A new era that will deliver faster, better, and more efficient healthcare and is set to be defined by conquering the backlog up and down the country.
On this, Barry Frostick, the Chief Digital and Information Officer at Mid and South Essex Integrated Care Board, said: “Integrated Care Systems were established for a reason – one of the main purposes was about how the Integrated Care Systems can work together, across the entire population, …to provide better healthcare for our patients.”
A lovely idea, but how exactly are they going to do it?
One word: data.
Data Saves Lives
In the Government’s recently published Data Saves Lives Strategy, data is celebrated as the driving force behind the country’s stoic resilience against Covid-19 and nominated as the avenue of the future for dealing with the industry’s longer-term problems such as tackling the backlog and elective recovery, as well as making the necessary reforms to shape the future of healthcare.
But data isn’t some new-fangled idea that some bright spark in I.T. has just come up with, in fact that’s one of the main problems, data in the NHS isn’t new at all, it’s quite often, well, old.
Barry explains: “Today, you’ll have a clinician walking around the hospital with an Excel spreadsheet trying to actually manage their lists of treatments and prescriptions on all their patients. By the time they’ve gone through them and done all that work, the spreadsheet might be out of date, and they’ve wasted time that could’ve been better spent elsewhere.”
Practices of the past don’t work anymore
Ronan Fenton, Mid and South Essex Integrated Care System’s Medical Director adds, “The truth is that what we have done in the past isn’t working anymore, and arguably didn’t really work well in the past anyway – actually, we just tolerated it.”
The data of the future might be the key to reshaping and rebuilding the healthcare system, but first you must unlock the data of the present – not the past.
End-to-end patient journey data
This is where Insource come in. Insource collect fully validated information on a patient’s end-to-end journey within the health system, allowing clinicians to see the big picture, at a moment’s notice.
FOR A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF THE ISSUES, SOLUTION, AND ITS EFFECTS
