Reflecting upon 2020, and establishing interoperability aims for 2021
As 2020 draws to a close, this marks an important time to reflect and take stock of the remarkable digital transformation of healthcare within the pandemic, and the changes seen and felt across the nation.
Based upon the learnings of the year, Healthcare Gateway can look forwards towards 2021, and remain adaptive to the next stages of the nation’s response to COVID-19. From here, we can set goals which continue to put the patient at the heart of everything we do.
From the outset this has been a year of significant change, following the Government’s instigation of the national lockdowns, Healthcare Gateway swiftly transitioned from a predominantly office-based workforce, to 100% remote working in a matter of days. Therefore, the achievement of continued productivity became a focus. With big changes happening overnight, our employee’s health and wellbeing was paramount; a happy and committed workforce enabled us to continue serving our customers through these challenging times.
With these points as a basis, the united approach to the industry’s support for the NHS in responding to COVID-19 inspired us to continue driving forward in connecting health and care. The expansion of our connectivity, to allow the flow of patient data across more healthcare settings, became the year’s priority, enabled by the Medical Interoperability Gateway (MIG) to provide national data sharing at a local level. Our customers old and new reached out to us, to support them with fast interoperability solutions within the ever-evolving and resource constrained health space.
I am proud to work within an industry, where we all pulled together. Hats off to front line staff right across our NHS health and care space, I am sincerely thankful for the world class care you have provided every day.
So where are we now? What does 2021 look like for Healthcare Gateway? This year, working alongside our accredited partners of the MIG, we have closely collaborated to make more patient data available to healthcare professionals for direct care, wherever needed. This collaboration has been key for Healthcare Gateway, but also for wider health tech businesses. Along with our 80 plus partners, we’ve ensured patient data is accessible for sharing across a range of healthcare settings. By nurturing and developing these close partnerships, together we can successfully facilitate the sharing of more data by health organisations and support our mutual customers, with the shared aims of delivering solutions critical to enhancing patient care.
Out of necessity for efficiency and access, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen a significant increase in the digitalisation of health care. Through this change, we’ve proudly engaged and facilitated the progression of interoperability projects across many regions. For example, in August, as part of the OneLondon Local Health and Care Record Exemplar (LHCRE) programme, MIG connectivity was enhanced to support interoperability across London, enabling a real-time view of the GP records of around eight million patients. Furthermore, in 2021 we look forward to some exciting upcoming projects, facilitating the sharing of patient data between a plethora of clinical system settings, from social care to mental health settings.
As we look towards 2021, our overarching strategy remains to support the NHS directive. In 2019, the Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) found critical deficiencies in the record-keeping systems used by the NHS trusts. In response, NHS X have announced their aims to implement shared medical records by next year, aligning with the interoperability aims set out in the NHS Long Term Plan & Local Health and Care Record programme. The MIG, which can be effectively deployed at scale and pace, can quickly improve the maturity of local care records. Therefore, we can assist and shape our interoperability services to enable this directive to be achieved, resolving care issues and data sharing challenges.
We’re not just a technology provider, our services comprise our fully managed service, which includes consultancy, support, development and implementation. Our customers and partners value this resource as it enables the MIG to be seamlessly and efficiently integrated into any system or setting. Our expertise can further enable resource efficiencies, improve the speed of integration, and enable patient care to be optimised within shorter time frames for our customers.
Furthermore, our products can be shaped to the needs of our customers, providing us with the scope to fulfil our customers’ needs at every step of their digital transformation journey. By scaling up and entering new healthcare settings the NHS Long Term Plan and digitalisation of the healthcare sector becomes ever-increasingly achievable. Supporting the work of Multi-Disciplinary teams (MDTs) and ensuring that everyone involved in a patient’s care can see the real-time data required is an area of focus at Healthcare Gateway. As we enter 2021, we will continue to build partnerships and products that help improve outcomes and reduce inpatient hospital admissions, for example, supporting people who receive care at home or live in care homes. We are also looking at the data sharing needs for MDTs in other areas of healthcare, in order to enable a complete, joined up health journey for all.
Wishing all a Merry Christmas from the team at Healthcare Gateway.
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