Innovation Exchange - Digital technology for remote monitoring, supporting the clinician/patient relationship to improve patient access and care.

In collaboration with the West Midlands Academic Health Science Network, we hosted an innovation exchange event on 5 October 2021.

The event was an opportunity for health and care service commissioners and providers to know more about solutions and/or products that can support them with the challenges they face.

Background

Delivering care with patients and their carers, in the comfort and safety of their place of residency is one of NHS England and Improvement’s (NHSE/I) ambitions as part of the digital enablement agenda within The NHS Long Term Plan.  Increasing our use of remote monitoring in health services is a key part of us achieving this vision.

Remote monitoring will also help to:

• empower patients to better self care and manage their condition(s)
• support health and care professionals, ensuring clinicians’ workload can be more appropriately focused
• improve clinical care, efficiency and safety
• benefit the environment with fewer patients’ travelling for unnecessary face to face appointments.

In 2020/21, NHSE/I, via NHSX, made funding available to purchase remote monitoring solution(s) to rapidly provide COVID Oximetry@home and Virtual Ward services.

During 2021/22, NHSX is supporting the conversion and scale up of these services to care for patients with long-term conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, heart failure and COPD. 

Future purchasing requirements of remote monitoring solutions by commissioners, as existing contracts expire, will look different as the use of remote monitoring increases to support more clinician/patient interactions.

Through collaboration with NHSE/I Midlands Region, the East and West Midlands AHSN Innovation Exchange Programmes we have worked to engage with suppliers of remote monitoring solutions who can support the delivery of these requirements. 

Challenge statements

Suppliers of remote monitoring solutions were required to evidence how they can:

• Support staff, patients and carers, to become more digitally literate in using their solution, improving inclusion and reducing exclusion and enabling self-care
  - A suite of educational resources and different delivery mechanisms (eg training)
• Generate a return on investment for commissioners (financially, time efficiency and for patient/clinician benefit)
• Future proof their solution, providing the willingness and ability to successfully develop their solution in line with NHS ambitions and requirements
• Dedicated change management expertise, experience, and skills working with clinicians and managerial staff to ‘best fit’ their solution in practice, co-designing solutions​
• Dedicated analytical expertise, experience, and skills, supporting the fulfilment of reporting and business case requirements (workload impact, for example)
• Ability to improve patient experience, when compared to traditional methods (face to face, for example)
• Meeting NHSX DTAC requirements & DPIA requirements, or a clear plan to meet them (if not already)
• ​24/7 technical support​

Additional requirements of solutions

Solutions were required to have:

• An ‘easy to learn and use’ front end and functionality, for patients, carers and staff
• Data analytics functionality to help inform staff, patients and carers, that can be easily learnt and used
• The ability to capture individual health and wellness information and associated measures (blood pressure, heart rate, for example), sharing with relevant staff, patients and carers, and detect, monitor and escalate deteriorating health and wellbeing
• Different communication options (video conferencing, chat, text, for example) to help reduce health inequalities and digital exclusion
• Interoperability and integration capability, to easily interface with the ‘front end’ (NHS App, for example) and other ‘back end’ systems (PKB, EMIS, SystmOne, other remote monitoring solutions, for example)​
• Industry standard data security and confidentiality​

Next steps

We encouraged suppliers to express their interest in how they might meet the identified challenge statements and these were presented at the event on 5th October 2021.

For more information on this process please email Phillip Stimpson, Senior Lead – Innovation and Improvement, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Resources

Event recording - Innovation Exchange - supporting the scale of remote monitoring,  Tuesday 5 October 2021.