Mar 23•6 min read
The NeverEnding Story
Where should I go to find innovative products I can use with my patients/client group within community practice?
Where do I look? Who do I ask?
It is like hunting for a beast that turns into a hundred mini beasts. Lots of bookmarks later, saved web links, printed out bits of paper and I feel disillusioned. Disillusioned that anybody within or outside healthcare wanting to look for apps, products or technology on a condition that would help them, give them knowledge, link them to a service is just, well, so extremely hard to find that you end up bewildered.
Knowing where to look for these items to check them out, read more information, trying to gage cost to implement and talk with CCG’s, becomes difficult.
Digital technology brings exciting changes and ways of working, but how do we implement them and most of all how can the care pathways change to allow easier adoption?
The King’s fund discusses transform, but currently how do these teams keep up with all these changes on top of staff retention, pressures and the day to day stresses of their jobs?
Staff within the NHS, from every level, are hungry for innovation, the means, the knowledge and the access are the detriments, and they are holding back many areas. The flow of communication is top down, usually filtered and can become stuck or not driven down to everyone.
People become frustrated that simple access to this knowledge is downright difficult.
The current process and adoption for innovations to develop and spread is far from easy to understand or navigate.
Knowledge spread of innovations and what is currently on offer and out there could be powerful, for everyone. From the patient to the clinician
Horizon scanning is a good start to search away and bring back to the mainstream what is out there.
The NIHR Innovation observatory has started such a thing, but most people do not known what the initials stand for let alone know it exits, and who is this aimed at?
So what is it that is happening to stop diffusion, adoption and spread?
The Accelerated Access Review paper highlights what many people find frustrating with the system.
The final report deals with the fundamental problems, there is no one approach of delivering a message of “here’s the products and knowledge you need!” You can find a "Making a reality of the Accelerated Access Review”.
I get the overall impression that they are still not clear and sure on what it is overall they need to do.
An amazing treasure trove for developers looking to get into health and the NHS is the NHS Developer Hub.
Though small, the NHS digital apps website lists all current apps that are deemed safe to use are approved for the NHS here.
End Well: the design for end of life experience, is a gathering of health, tech, design and activist communities. Ivor Williams’ ‘talk is great food for thought. Previous talks A talks showcased the simplicity of redesign of the DNR (do not resuscitate form, “We didn’t redesign a form. We redesigned a relationship”. Great achievements can still be done on paper.
How can we overcome this dead wall of non-spread of innovation and adoption?
As a clinician NHS worker, having that power and knowledge of what was available for you to use in your everyday treatment would be powerful, patients knowing that you had options for them to take hold of their own care.
Or could it be that new technologies, products and innovations are directly embedded into care pathways, constantly reviewed and updated. Allowing teams and front line workers to see the very products that they struggle to get hold of and know about.
Not forgetting to the hard to reach people who are not digitally minded, have a smartphone or even internet access. If we could reach them what would we offer?
Again, how do we do this?
Sheffield’s perfect patient test bed programme shows good examples of how integrating technology and products into care pathways provides results can be provided by such a way of working.
Should embedding technology and products into commissioning of services be mandatory, to enable patient pathways to maximise innovation?
Risks and uncertainties will always be part and parcel, but the implementation and spread and adoption of new technologies and being sensitive to patient needs and reducing inequalities and access to them. It would increase adoption in the primary and community care setting.
There are always going to be risks and uncertainties with any change or new way of doing things.
Embedding a new product technology should not be just a team taking it on and using it, but allowing discovery and novel uses to embed in. New care pathways should and could be developed.
New apps that are developed are usually used differently than what the person who designed it envisaged, look at Instagram’s story and how it started life out as an app called ‘Burbn’.
Maybe they’ll be a Netflix type platform approach to delivering new and present innovations for healthcare, or an Amazon type service of delivery or availability of services and ways of delivering them.
Being able to find what you need to help you, but putting that information in the hands of anyone can be very powerful.
These products and technologies can change the way we work, the way in which a patient is treated, yet presently many services aren’t sure how to implement the technology and ends up as an add on to what they are already doing. A pathway redesign to incorporate the product and how it could truly change practises and the way in which we work and monitor patient progress should be investigated and researched.
The King’s Fund article from 2016 “The Digital Revolution: eight technologies that will change health and care” is a good read, especially to see how far we have come since it was written, or not in some cases! The 40 comments are well worth a read too, passion for technology and product
Hope is a powerful thing. Giving someone this can be transformational. An NHS worker who has a repository of knowledge and knowing what innovative products or apps is out there to use and can be used, gives them a bank of ideas to work with their patients.
This is a very solvable problem.
