What Good Looks Like

The ‘What Good Looks Like’ framework set out by NHSX provides guidance for health and care leaders to help digitise, connect and transform health services safely and securely to improve patient outcomes.

It includes 7 measures of success which will be used to accelerate digital transformation, by allowing leaders to assess current levels of digital maturity and identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.

1. Well led: Leaders in healthcare will drive digital transformation and promote a culture which leads to delivering efficient, safe, high quality care.
2.  Ensure smart foundations: Putting in place reliable, modern, secure and resilient data and infrastructure to continuously improve IT and digital services.
3. Safe practice: Ensuring that technology meets the standards set out by Digital Technology Assessment Criteria.
4. Support people: Ensuring workforce is digitally literate and able to work well with data and technology.
5. Empower citizens: Ensuring citizens have access to digital services that suit all literacy and digital inclusion needs.
6. Improve care: Using data and technology to transform care pathways, and ensure patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.
7. Healthy populations: Using insights from data to address health inequalities and improve health and wellbeing of the population.

The goal of this framework is to ensure that NHS leaders have the right information to digitally transform services to provide better, safer care. For further information, please see the NHSX website here.

Who Pays for What

‘Who Pays for What’ will change the way that the NHS tackles digital investment and will take steps to support Integrated Care Systems (ICS’s) in making better investment decisions. Initially it addresses the current barriers to digital investment and goes on to propose actions to overcome these barriers in the years to come.

The main barriers to investment in digital technology were found to include:

• Complex funding arrangements
• Lack of visibility of future national funding opportunities
• Single year budgets and late notification which results in poor investment choices
• Complicated bidding processes
• Measurable benefits to digital investments not being fully understood by all
• Unknown current costs on technology, unknown suggested costs and the impact underinvestment on technology can have.

NHSX Digital then go on to outline their plan to tackle these problems in 2021-2022, which includes simplifying the funding process; moving forward national funds will be combined into one singular pot. The Unified Tech Fund provides guidance on the application process for bidding for funding. You can read more about this later on in this article. NHSX will also improve the metrics that are available to help ICS’s understand where they are digitally and what they need to do to fulfil the successes in ‘What Good Looks Like’. The proposal will also provide tools to help ICS’s track the benefits that they gain from their investments in technology.

You can read more about the plans to tackle barriers to investment in technology in 2022 and onwards, on the NHSX website.

Unified Tech Fund

The Unified Tech Fund has brought together a number of national technology funds, amounting to a total of £680 million being available to NHS organisations in the 2021 – 2022 financial year. The aim of this funding is to ensure a basic shared care record is in place within all ICS’s, to support the digitisation of pharmacy, optometry, dentistry, ambulance and community services sectors and improve interoperability and as a result, improve patient safety and experience through increased digitisation.

The different funding areas included are:

• Frontline digitisation
• Shared care records
• Cyber security infrastructure funds
• Digital productivity
• Digital pharmacy, optometry, dental, ambulance and community (PODAC)
• Diagnostics
• Digital maternity
• Digital child health.

All of these have been allocated different amounts of funding and all have different closing dates ranging between October 2021 and March 2022. The prospectus then sets out the application process for each of the individual funds, including the requirements of applications. For more information on the different funds available, see the Unified Tech Fund prospectus.

At Healthcare Gateway, we aim to make sure our customers have access to all the information they need to improve their digital transformation, along with the support required to make the necessary changes to improve interoperability across health and care settings. To find out how we can help your organisation in your journey to digital transformation, please get in touch here.