The King’s Fund has prepared since 2011 a Quarterly Monitoring Report on the performance of the NHS as seen by its finance directors. It is a ‘regular update on how the NHS is coping as it grapples with the evolving reform agenda and the more significant challenge of making radical improvements in productivity.’ Report #15 does not bring auspicious news as the challenges deepen. 7 of 10 NHS trust directors are concerned about balancing their books next year, and 60 percent have either drawn down reserves or relied on additional financial support. In healthcare delivery performance, over 440,000 patients in this quarter spent more than four hours in A&E (US=ER or ED), the poorest performance since 2003. (more…)
Runup to UK General Election: where parties stand on health issues
The King’s Fund continues to perform a great public service in objectively following and compiling where the five major parties stand on health issues and drawing some clear lines. In the 7 May election, the future of the NHS has become one of the major issues facing Britain, to the point of ‘make-or-break’. Their latest digest presents Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and UKIP pledges in six areas in animated infographic style: NHS forward funding, mental health, integrated care (health and social care, national/local levels), GP access (US=primary care), public health and NHS reform. More detailed information is available in PDF form. The main website on their General Election coverage including the major parties’ manifestos as well as the independent National Health Action Party is here. Bottom line: the NHS needs £8 billion to maintain itself. The rest is debate. Kudos to The King’s Fund, and makes us even prouder to be again this year a supporter of the Digital Health and Care Congress (and to offer our readers a 10 percent discount on registration, see sidebar to right.)
Our UK readers who want a stinging critique of the parties’ stances (concentrating on Conservative and Labour) would do well to read Roy Lilley’s latest in his NHSManagers newsletter here.
Capita announces partnership with Medibank Australia
Capita Healthcare Decisions is forming a partnership with Medibank, an Australian [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Capita-logo.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]insurance and healthcare company, according to a press release issued by Capita. One of the areas highlighted in the announcement is that Capita will provide its TeleGuide product which [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Medibank.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Medibank has customised to the Australian market.
Capita, with 68,000 staff, is a UK company providing process management and professional support services in the UK, Europe, South Africa and India and has a checkered history with UK Government health service contracts.
In Nov 2008 Capita won the contract to run UK’s NHS Choices website which provides information on medical conditions, treatments and services to UK patients on behalf of the UK Department of Health. The Cabinet Office then refused to renew the £60m 3-year NHS Choices contract with Capita in 2013. (more…)
The King’s Fund’s ‘newspaper’ on health and the General Election (UK)
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/General-election.png” thumb_width=”150″ /]The King’s Fund is now participating in the runup to the 7 May UK General Election with Health and the election, a Paper.li format roundup of national health issues. Much of it centers around the present and the future of the NHS, and what The King’s Fund is tracking as the deterioration in service in such metrics as waiting times for A&E, cancer care and routine operations, coupled with growing deficits. Will the NHS be a deciding factor in the election, as the ITV report seems to indicate? The King’s Fund is gathering the coverage and tracking possible answers to that question. TTA is an official supporter of The King’s Fund, and their upcoming Digital Health and Care Congress 2015 on 16-17 June. TTA readers enjoy a 10% discount when using this exclusive link.
Scotland invests £30M over 3 years on telehealth (UK)
In a news release this morning (19 March 2015) the Scottish Government said it is to allocate [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/scotland-gov-logo1.gif” thumb_width=”150″ /]£200m over two years to support the implementation of health and social care integration.
According to the release the investment will extend the current Integrated Care Fund into 2016/17 and 2017/18, and comes on top of £100 million of funding already allocated for 2015/16. The money will be distributed among the 32 local NHS and social care partnerships that have been set up as part of the move towards integrated services.
The Integrated Care Fund forms part of over half a billion pounds of Government investment over the next three years that will be used to support integration, including £100 million over three years for delayed discharge, and £30 million over three years for Telehealth.
The Integrated Care Fund supports the implementation of plans to bring together health and local authority care services by 1 April 2016. This will give the partnerships the resources to focus on preventative care and early intervention as well as support for people with multiple and long-term conditions. (more…)
The NHS, tech, and the next 10 years – soapbox, event & call for posters
As a distraction from the things that, before the advent of handheld technology, little boys used to do in the school playground when this editor was young, once in a while we would engage in the pointless debate of what would happen if an irresistible force met an immovable object.
Those debates came to mind when Graham De’Ath kindly drew this editor’s attention to the recently published Labour Ten Year Plan for Health & Care. Now Telehealth & TelecareAware knows better than to indulge in politics, however the document was notable in that it did not make any significant reference either to the demographic reality of the next ten years, or the likely role of ‘technology’ in assisting with the resultant increase in care required (the word is mentioned just once, in the commitment to: “Set up a wide–ranging review of NICE which will look at reforming the NICE technology appraisal process…” [actually already underway by the NIB]). The Labour Party is far from being alone in this – readers with long memories will recall our amusement as the RCGP’s ten year forecast of the changes in GP practice where the biggest role technology was expected to play in 2022 was in remote delivery of test results.
The reality, TTA believes, will be very different: (more…)
A tale of two chessboards
Things happen ever faster on the second half of the chessboard. No sooner had the ink dried on our predictions for 2015, and Dr Eric Topol told the story of the first patient to call him with a smartphone diagnosis than Alivecor announced that they now have CE certification for their AF-diagnosing app.
Mind you, whilst Dr Topol might welcome this, it seems that others are still on a different chessboard: under the heading “Doctors fear that new health tech is turning UK into a nation of “worried well””, a recent survey of UK doctors showed that “Seven out of ten (76%) GPs said they had noticed a marked increase in number of patients “self-diagnosing” from the internet over the past twelve months” suggesting, in the words of 1066 & all that, that technology is a Bad Thing. What, this reviewer wonders, will be the reaction to (more…)
NHS seeks pioneering healthcare innovators – yes really!
When this editor first read about the scheme, his thoughts went to headlines like “NHS seeks oxymorons”, as that organisation is not noted for its cherishing of innovators. (Indeed at a recent event in Manchester I was told by a speech & language therapist who was saving the NHS two orders of magnitude in lower costs in helping stroke victims to swallow again by using remote consultation vs in-patient hospital stays that her boss had told her there was no place for her in the NHS.)
However it seems they seek innovators outside the NHS to enable it to adopt innovations at scale and pace: “NHS England is inviting healthcare pioneers from around the world to apply to develop and scale their tried and tested innovations across parts of the NHS.”
“Applicants should be experienced innovators in healthcare who are currently leading or working on new technologies, services and processes that have the potential to make a real difference to patient outcomes.”
Details of the NHS Innovation Accelerator Programme are here, and the Digital by Default news item, here.
2015: a few predictions (UK-biased)
As intimated in our review of last year’s predictions, we feel little need to change course significantly, however some are now done & dusted, whereas others have a way to go. The latter include a concern about doctors, especially those in hospitals, continuing to use high-risk uncertified apps where the chance of injury or death of a patient is high if there is an error in them. Uncertified dosage calculators are considered particularly concerning.
Of necessity this is an area where clinicians are unwilling to be quoted, and meetings impose Chatham House rules. Suffice to say therefore that the point has now been well taken, and the MHRA are well aware of general concerns. Our first prediction therefore is that:
One or more Royal College/College will advise or instruct its members only to use CE-certified or otherwise risk-assessed medical apps.
The challenge here of course is that a restriction to CE-certified apps-only would be a disaster as many, if not most, apps used by clinicians do not meet the definition of a Medical Device and so could not justifiably be CE-certified. And apps are now a major source of efficiencies in hospitals – (more…)
Wearables blog – update
Since this editors’ piece on wearables four days ago there has been a stream of news about interoperability of various apps, resulting in frequent updates to the original blog, to the point where it was beginning no longer to resemble the original.
Chris Bergstrom of WellDoc has now kindly pointed me to the Mobihealthnews item on Samsung’s digital health partners announcement, and to his company’s specific interoperability announcement with Samsung, enabling activity and other data to be obtained from other Android apps to help those with diabetes to manage their condition better.
WellDoc of course developed the first prescription app – this item from mHealthWatch in turn based on a Telegraph article that suggests that GPs in the UK will shortly be prescribing apps for patients in large quantities. The source of the Telegraph’s intelligence is none other than Personalised Health and Care 2020, the recently published NHS document that we covered extensively yesterday, which was perhaps a tad less optimistic about medical app take-up.
Personalised health & care 2020 – required reading! (UK)
The NHS’s National Information Board (NIB) this week published its long awaited document on its plans for personalising health and social care activities, with a strong England focus. It breaks new ground for such a document in many ways (not least that when you put ‘apps’ or ‘telehealth’ or a myriad of other terms into the search engine, you get many hits!).
Before describing at some length why this editor considers the document to be so important, it is of course important to recognise that there will be an election in six months’ time so both the funding and the priorities of the NHS may well change before it has even got beyond the very first set of commitments. A further point is that, were the NHS to meet all the commitments it has made, even in recent years, it would be a very different organisation to that that it is: commitment do not necessary result in delivery.
The document is subtitled “A framework for action” which is a good description. it contains many individual commitments. However few are are sufficiently (more…)
The sun is in his heaven and all’s well with the world?
It’s tempting to think that nothing much has changed in the world of telehealth & telecare recently. For example the quality of healthcare PR looks to be unchanged, if the recent announcement by Telehealth Sensors is anything to go by. They claim to have developed an incontinence sensor that is “a revolutionary advancement in the home healthcare and post-acute care monitoring market.” Careful reading suggests this “revolutionary advancement” is based on the property of water, apparently only recently recognised by Telehealth Sensors, that it conducts electricity (especially if its impure) – so advanced in fact that such sensors with a rather longer lifetime than the 30 days claimed by Telehealth Sensors, have (more…)
The King’s Fund videos, presentations online
The King’s Fund has posted video highlights from last month’s International Digital Health and Care Congress. Talks include those from futurist Ray Hammond, Kathleen Hammond (US Department of Veterans Affairs), Dr Ali Parsa (Babylon), Paul Rice (NHS England) and Sian Jones (NHS Bristol). Click on the tabs at top for presentation decks and posters. TTA was a media partner of the Congress. Hat tip to Mike Clark via Twitter (@clarkmike).
Smartphones, wearables are the future says NHS England
NHS England has sketched out the future of healthcare and it will be one using smartphones and wearable bio-sensors to monitor ourselves and alert clinicians. [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/NHS-England.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]NHS National Medical Director Sir Bruce Keogh has written to around 250 organisations across health, social care, industry and third sector asking them to support the Technology Enabled Care Services (TECS) programme which he says will take the NHS into this new technological era.
The TECS programme, born out of the Three Million Lives (3ML) initiative (which didn’t quite go anywhere after all the song and dance, including from Prime Minister David Cameron), was reviewed last year resulting in the change of focus to “address the demand for support and practical tools to commission, procure, implement and evaluate technology enabled care services” according to Sir Bruce’s letter as reported on the NHS England website.
The TECS Stakeholder Forum‘s views and proposals now form the TECS Improvement Plan for 2014-17. This is a broader group following the failure of the 3ML Stakeholder Forum, which consisted mainly big industry organisations, to achieve anything of substance.
According to the NHS England website posting, Sir Bruce explains: “To ensure continued progress, we have brought together a TECS Implementation Group consisting of experts and leaders from across these sectors whose remit is to support the strategic development and delivery of the proposals within the Improvement Plan. In addition, we have formed the TECS Executive Steering Group which meets regularly to provide clinical, technological and strategic leadership for the programme at a director level in NHS England.”
This all sounds like a lot of bureaucracy and a drawn out attempt to rescue what remains of the 3ML programme. I started thinking of the Titanic and deck chairs.
NHS futures: Personalised and Preventative Care presentation
Courtesy of Accenture, we now have (perhaps exclusively?) Aimie Chapple’s full presentation delivered at the NHS Futures Summit in November. The link is contained at the end of Editor Charles’ article on ‘NHS futures – more encouraging signs of change‘ which puts it into context and is definitely worth your reading time. Hat tip to Mark Radvanyi of Accenture for providing Personalised and Preventative Care: Technology Trends and Disruptors that will Shape the Healthcare Transformation.
Proteus to build UK plant, work with NHS; PM’s 5G may save the day
The Proteus smart pill, once found to be so ‘creepy’, is making its first significant international move by planning to build a UK plant ultimately capable of turning out 10 billion units annually, and also partnering with several NHS-affiliated groups: Eastern Academic Health Science Network (EAHSN), The Northern Health Science Alliance (NHSA) and Oxford University, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust and Oxford Academic Health Science Network (OAHSN). According to their CEO Andrew Thompson (quoted in Mobihealthnews), this starts the long NHS tendering and commissioning process. Beyond the sensors in the Proteus pill, the signal is picked up by a disposable patch receiver which transmits via Bluetooth to a smartphone and a tracking app. The business model in their current and future projected digital health devices is based on delivering an outcome, providing vital information about medication-taking behaviors and how your body is responding, not selling the device. How this will blend with the NHS model is a good guess, but the article points out that this may take up some of the loss of pharmaceutical manufacturing business in the UK–a big plus.
And all the bandwidth that Proteus will take up will be no problem, since UK and Germany will be jointly developing 5G wireless networks in the next two years which verily will gulp down all that data, along with having all your devices share the IOT (Internet of Things) chat line while you fast forward that 800 MB movie. The team consists of the University of Dresden, King’s College University in London and the University of Surrey. Note PM David Cameron’s writing pad versus Chancellor Angela Merkel’s tablet/folder combo at the photo taken at the CeBIT 2014 announcement. Daily Mail. Hat tip on both items to reader Mike Short and our own Editor Charles Lowe.
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