"A collaborative and data-first approach can bring great outcomes"

The care is shifting from hospitals to regions, communities, and homes, services must be designed around the patient and not organisations, and providing enough digitally skilled people are the three challenges that are shaping healthcare industry at the moment.

Matt Cox, our Managing Director UK & Ireland, sat down with HETT Show and discussed the shift in care, tailored processes for patients, and the workforce in digital health. Read the whole interview below.

Tell us a bit about how your organisation currently supports the health and care sector.
At Better, we are trying to improve health and care for all by simplifying the work of health and care teams, and accelerating digital transformation, underpinned by data for life. We firmly believe that good data can improve decisions and save lives and should be kept for the lifetime of a patient. That is why we base all our products on the openEHR standard that will accelerate development and digital transformation.

We have just provided a dynamic integrated care plan solution, the Urgent Care Plan, for London that enables every Londoner to have their care and support wishes digitally shared with healthcare professionals across the capital. The solution shares real-time data across urgent and emergency, primary, secondary, and community healthcare settings and enables the relevant technical capability to provide interoperability with the existing health and care IT systems. Better’s digital health platform and its low code tools are used to support the modernisation and transformation of EPRs as well as clinical, patient, and research services.

Our medication management solution Better Meds is live in 10 NHS Trusts in the UK, among them SLaM, Plymouth, Oxford, and others. The solution is making it possible for the medical staff to focus more on patients and significantly reduce medication errors.

What are some of the biggest challenges that you have identified when working closely with your NHS/Care partners?
We see three challenges that are shaping the healthcare industry at the moment. The first one is the shift in care, as it is shifting from the hospitals to regions, communities, and homes. The second challenge is to design services around the patient, not the organisations which require changing the way we create and interact with technology. We must switch from ‘view and share’ data to ‘contribute and co-create' data with the patients and their carers to their care records. The third challenge is providing enough digitally skilled people to meet the challenges of the NHS. We must use data for better care of patients and we think that a collaborative and data-first approach can bring real-time access to information and great outcomes.

Very crucial challenges raised. Tell us how working with your products and solutions can help tackle some of the challenges that exist within digital health.
Better is a technology company that provides an open data digital health platform (Better Platform), designed to store, manage, query, retrieve, and exchange structured electronic health records, and electronic prescribing and medication administration solution, Better Meds. We build personalised digital applications and accelerate digitalisation by using low-code development tools. We advocate for data for life and strive for all health data to be vendor-neutral and easily accessible. With that, we put organisations in control of their data, workflows, and transformation plans in order to improve patient care.

We also understand that resources are finite and people with the right skills can be scarce. Now particularly with home working, job opportunities span wider than UK and there is increasing pressure on regional teams. We believe that using low code, sharing content, visualisations, forms, and applications between NHS organisations for no cost is a key pillar to learn, test, and deploy new technology at pace.

We will be hosting HETT Connect again this year, enabling speakers to meet with exhibitors on a 1:1 basis. Who are you hoping to meet?
HETT is a great opportunity to meet with professionals from the industry, so we are looking forward to the event every year. We are very excited to meet our customers and our partners, as well as new potential customers who could profit from our products and solutions.

What are you looking forward to the most at HETT Show 2022?
We are looking forward to discovering the latest digital health trends, innovations, and challenges in the industry. We are eager to hear about our customers and other success stories and learn from them, and to see how we can further use technology for a meaningful transformation.

The original interview with Matt Cox was published before the HETT 2022 show here.