The Royal Borough of Greenwich has set up a Digital Health and Care Technology Service to support the use of emerging tech in local care services.
Caleb Assirati, the council’s strategic commissioning and systems development lead, told the UKAuthorITy Integrating Digital Health and Care conference that the service went live at the end of March following two years of research and design.
It involves a handful of partners: Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, South East London Integrated Care Board, Rethink Partners as change consultants and Alcove as the prime technology supplier.
“A push towards how we work with new technology became more of an expectation,” Assirati said. “Some of that expectation comes from our residents, and local people are expecting us to deliver care in different ways to help people stay independent, safe and well. It’s not just about us wanting to do this.
“There’s so much digital capability evolving in the market, and we were conscious that we had done several pilots and knew there was so much more we could do, but people were a little sick of pilots and it’s about a sustainable way of delivering the new capabilities and opportunities in digital health and care.”
The service has been designed from working with a residents’ group, is governed by a board of senior responsible owners from the partner organisations and operates with an integrated budget. There has also been extended engagement with the care technology market to understand what is achievable.
Among the devices delivered to residents are video care phones, smart watches, epilepsy sensors, fall alert devices, panic buttons and translator phones, many of which are connected to portal managed by Alcove, which provides connections to Greenwich’s in-house monitoring centre, care workers and residents’ families.
There are plans to extend the variety of sensors and add new clinical monitoring capabilities to provide virtual wards for people needing medical care.
“There are obvious benefits to in this to our hospitals and for people to stay at home for longer,” Assirati said. “It’s meeting people where they are, and seeing if we can do these things remotely.
He said that, while it is too early to quantify any results from the service, the process so far has produced some key learnings. These include the need to place residents at the heart of the process, provide integrated leadership and funding across the partners, design in an aspirational way – not iterating on what is already there – and adopting a continuous service improvement plan and mindset.
“We want a continual improvement of the initial service offer,” Assirati said. “We want it to be a place where we can innovate, look at new technology and work with practitioners and residents to understand the key issues. We want to make sure we keep getting the best things on the market for our residents.
“We also want to work on data integration and automation, how we get better at using data across different departments such as housing and being more proactive about data coming through.”
Caleb Assirati spoke at UKAuthorITy Integrating Digital Health and Care conference. Watch his presentation below:
If you are experiencing difficulties playing the video click here to watch it
