(UPDATE MAR19 - Please see latest Version 0.11 in comments below)
Here is the first of our Technology Advice documents to be circulated for feedback. This document looks at technology enabled GP services - what would the current GP model look like with a full suite of technology enablers? Who is impacted, and what considerations are there for health sector stakeholders?
The intention is for this document to be a conversation starter, with a high level overview. It is to help people understand the relevant technologies, rather than the benefits of specific products.
A brief comment - you might want to have a summary tab of ‘guiding principles to manage with health technology’. Privacy, ethics, open data standards etc. Whatever the general MOH strategy is, it’d be useful for guidance to include a repeated snippet alongside your analysis even if it’s a small infographic.
Morning @Gordon_Munro, I will update below with the latest version of the document - please reference this one.
Happy for this doc to be circulated to those who are outside of our Yammer page, however we encourage people to join the EHT Yammer group to access this doc directly, and continue the discussion in this forum if possible.
We welcome any feedback you may receive!
OK so lots of thoughts…the first one is that technology is not going to solve the issues around the delivery of primary care. It is going to need process change and technology change. If you ask a GP what has changed about how they see a patient today compared to when they started out 20 or 30 years ago, the only thing that has changed is that the information they record is no longer written down instead it is typed into a computer. it is still a face to face consult, it is still 15 mins and it is still the situation that mostly appointments run late!
So I think the document should talk about technology enablers rather than technology based General Practice. Interesting the title is “enablers”, but it morphs in the document into “technology based” practice.
Next thought is about Healthcare Homes initiative. This initiative is a good example of how a combination of new technologies and process change can deliver excellent outcomes. I wonder why this wasn’t covered in your document.?
I agree that models of care should be enabled by technology and the healthcare homes approach appears to be a better model of care than our traditional approach (there is some compelling evidence but it isn’t conclusive).
In developing this and the other documents so far, we have deliberately started from the technology space, primarily to demystify some of the technology terms, show people the common technologies many different products share and the potential of the technology.
I guess in this context we are interested in showing that there are lots of technologies that could support a general practice model, not that the right GP model needs X technologies?
It might mean that these don’t answer your questions/thoughts but hopefully this helps a bit?
Thanks John, I think what you say makes sense. I certainly dont have all the answers and my posts were to see if we could get some discussion going on what technologies might help and which ones we need to park for the meantime. There is a lot of education to be done in the GP communitiy. We have only just passed the point where more than 50% of practices have a patient portal. (as a side note, I’d love to see stats on actual usage of the portals).
I also think it is important not to frighten off GPs with technology discussions, so demystifying the terms is great and the comparison with what is happening offshore is really useful so that people can see that these things are REAL.
Yep - totally agree - thanks for helping - our testing with non-technical people in this space with this document has gone very well (is going to PSAAP). Key things from our perspective are interoperability and identity. For me at least getting those sorted lets us use lots more technology.
Something that is worth considering is that we need to be setting things up for the future rather than today or yesterday - so understand the need to engage current clinicians, but we need to support those who will become clinicians in the future (given health moves so slowly). This means some of the answers in this space aren’t necessarily technologies, but principles about how they are used.
An interesting new article around Babylon in the NHS - 110,000 app downloads… with 25% churn annually.
opengraphobject:[351561256184270 : https://www.wired.co.uk/article/babylon-health-nhs : title=“The messy, cautionary tale of how Babylon disrupted the NHS | WIRED UK” : description=“Babylon’s London-based GP surgery is already one of the biggest in the country. But its impact on other NHS services in the area is causing concern amongst clinicians”]
- our testing with non-technical people in this space with this document has gone very well (is going to PSAAP). Key things from our perspective are interoperability and identity. For me at least getting those sorted lets us use lots more technology.