The Seven Steps to Implementing Agile Health and Care Digital Ecosystems

In my previous blog post, I explained how open data and digital technology are enablers for better care, and a way to quickly respond to new situations. Now, let’s take a look at how healthcare providers can assemble their own digital environment, so that it:

• maximises the value of existing investments in healthcare IT,
• gives them control of their data, so they can become more vendor-independent, and
• provides them with more agility so they can add new solutions to their ecosystems, and personalise their digital health solutions for different settings and specialisations. 

This can be done in the following seven steps:

1. Set up a health-data platform that puts you in control of patient data.
2. Set up a structured clinical data repository (CDR) to create a vendor-neutral patient record for life.
3. Connect key, existing applications to the new CDR in order to start building life-long patient records.
4. Set up a unified, 360-degree patient view to give medical teams instant access to key patient information, and help them make more informed decisions more quickly.
5. Implement a healthcare-specific, low-code studio to enable agility and making quick adjustments to new situations.
6. Identify a next use case to develop or include additional applications to the ecosystem.
7. Connect with the community to start collaborating with peers and vendors, and further grow your data-driven digital ecosystem, which will provide answers for your current and future requirements in healthcare.
   

Let me conclude with a recent example of this approach. I was really glad to learn that one of our customers, Somerset NHS Trust in the UK, was able to independently build COVID-19-specific digital solutions on top of our platform in March, and that it took them less than three weeks. IT personnel and clinicians worked together, which made it possible for the medical teams to get the solutions that really suited their needs, and this enabled them to respond more efficiently in the crisis situation. 

Mark Hunt, IT Development Manager at the Trust, explained: “Solutions within our ecosystem do not just directly provide an answer to the clinical needs of today. They give us the ability to provide solutions for today and tomorrow, meeting our future needs, and I think that from a technology point of view, that's really the key.”