Tag: Digital

Funding awarded to help home COPD management

Supported by the West of England AHSN, the health system in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) has been awarded funding from NHSX’s Digital Health Partnership Award to roll-out the myCOPD app alongside digital health champions to support patients with Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

myCOPD provides guides on self-management, how and when to take medication, pulmonary rehabilitation and more, to help patients to recover and manage their condition effectively at home.

Roll-out of the app within the BNSSG system will start in December 2021, expanding to further areas throughout 2022.

Find out more about the myCOPD app.

More information about the Digital Health Partnership Award funding is available here.

A focus on COPD as part of the National Adoption and Spread Safety Improvement Programme (A&S-SIP)

The overarching objective of the A&S-SIP is to identify and support the spread and adoption of effective and safe evidence-based interventions and practice.

Each of the programme’s objectives intend to make medical procedures, and discharges from acute settings, as safe as possible whilst driving forward healthcare innovation.

In relation to COPD, our local delivery has focused on supporting an increase in the proportion of patients in acute hospitals receiving every element (for which they are eligible) of the British Thoracic Society COPD discharge care bundle.

The national A&S-SIP is led by NHS England and Improvement. The programme is delivered locally by the West of England Patient Safety Collaborative. Read more about A&S-SIP.

Industry roundtable discussions inform AHSN Network support offer

The AHSN Network, of which the West of England AHSN is a member, is planning a series of “Bridging the gap” events this autumn aimed at providing support, information and advice for innovators across industry. The plans have been developed following a roundtable discussion hosted by the AHSN Network to listen to the experiences and challenges faced by industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The roundtable, titled Lessons learned and lived experiences of industry during the pandemic – how these can help us reset health and care together, was primarily an opportunity to hear from industry. The group discussed how the views and experiences of industry could be taken forward and inform the NHS Reset process as we move into “phase 3” of the response to the pandemic. You can watch a short film summarising the event here.

In essence, the key themes of discussion around actions that need to involve industry insights to support reset included:

  • Effectively embedding new care/service models that have developed during the pandemic
  • Getting rapid evaluation and reimbursement models working more effectively, building on the lessons learned in recent months
  • Managing the consequences of the dramatic decrease in non-COVID care and considering digital interventions that can help manage patient care and outcomes.

Organisations joining the AHSN Network in this virtual roundtable included:

  • the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI),
  • the British In Vitro Diagnostic Association (BIVDA),
  • the Digital Health and Care Alliance (DHACA),
  • the Association of British Health Industries (ABHI),
  • Health Foundation,
  • Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC),
  • NHSX,
  • the Office for Life Sciences (OLS),
  • Spirit Health Group, and
  • the NHS Confederation.

Niall Dickson, Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, said:

“The NHS has been through the most traumatic period in its history – we have seen some of most awful consequences of this terrible pandemic and some of the most fantastic responses from both health and care staff.

“We have seen innovation and its implementation at an unimaginable speed and scale that’s never been seen before, and we now urgently need to review what has happened and make sure we capture the positive transformations have been made possible by working with industry.

“We are keen for these relationships to continue and for us all to work hard to maintain this momentum.”

Read more about the event here.

This event forms part of the AHSN Network work on supporting the health and care reset, ensuring that we work across both NHS and industry to sustain and maximise on potential advances and transformative ways of working.

Quality Improvement in the age of COVID – launching PERIPrem

Posted on by Vanesther Hamer

Noshin Menzies, Senior Project Manager, shares her experiences of launching a Quality Improvement programme during COVID.

If you’d told me 4 months ago we would be where we are today with PERIPRem, I’d have wondered what planet you were from. This exciting, ambitious care bundle, the vision of two extraordinary neonatologists, was going to launch in April and change the way that perinatal care is delivered across the entire South West region. It was a seed reliant on collaboration. However, 2020 had other plans…

The fundamentals of PERIPRem – nurturing a regional clinical community dedicated to improving outcomes for our most vulnerable babies and working side by side with women and their families – were, in an instant, stopped in their tracks.

Pre-COVID, I had been lucky enough to attend the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology’s “Let’s Talk about Race” event for International Women’s Day. The stories I heard further cemented the commitment we had to reducing inequalities.  We could not deliver a perinatal quality improvement project without ensuring that we were actively listening – and considering how to chip away at the barriers that result in Black and Minority Ethnic women being 5 times more likely to die in childbirth and their children to experience poorer outcomes. This was even before we knew the increased risk of COVID to people of colour and the raised chance of preterm labour for those women unfortunate enough to contract the virus whilst pregnant.

Just as we finalised plans for launch, and to get out into the communities and find every opportunity to involve those who lives are imprinted by the experience of preterm birth, COVID hit. Our PERIPRem teams were now on the battle lines, and we were nestled behind our laptop screens, shell shocked. Our ability to be agile and adapt to novel ways of working mattered now more than ever.

I’ll admit, I was sceptical how we could launch what was still a seedling of a programme to twelve units across the whole of the South West, when we were unable to leave our kitchens, let alone realise our plans to provide fertile ground for the creation of a regional PERIPRem clinical community. Without a physical launch, how could we provide space for those small but mighty moments, that when cultivated, have more of an impact than any toolkit or presentation?

I often struggle when I have to describe QI; in my experience it is much bigger than a framework or a process by which you can input your problem and wait for gold-standard results. For me, QI has its foundations in the people, the team and the culture. It is the introductions to new faces, teams huddled together around meeting tables, clinicians whispering to colleagues they had not seen for years and the camaraderie brewed alongside the substandard coffee.  We grow highly functioning teams, and the most exciting part of any QI project, on these blocks. It was boom or bust but I needn’t have worried.

We have formed strong bonds as a PERIPRem team; we have even managed a team social. My treasured counterpart in the South West AHSN and I have never met, we joke that we do not know what each other look like from the shoulders down. We have bonded over the many cameos from the PERIPRem teams’ children – or Assistant QI Coaches as they are now known.

Most importantly, the PERIPRem perinatal teams have flourished. Whilst in the pressure cooker of the pandemic, we gave space and time to focus on delivering patient care – when they got a handle on what it meant for them as clinicians, they came back raring to go.  We have digitised all of our resources and are now holding webinars on each of the bundle elements – they are so well attended we cannot fit on a screen!

People have pushed through discomfort to record themselves sharing the clinical fundamentals and to provide the presence (all be it through a screen) we all miss. We are exploring new ways to engage with the women we were so keen to meet and listen to, and we are forever indebted to our patient representatives who are now pillars of our PERIPRem team.

The takeaway message from that tired trope of “these unprecedented times” is that we are stronger than we think. At the end of each exhausting day, when we have had our fill of fighting for bandwidth with Xboxing teenagers, with tired mouths from calmly saying, “you’re on mute”, we have been and will continue to be successful. More significantly, we have supported frazzled teammates, butted horns and laughed until we cried.

There is a sense of freedom this way of working has granted us. Whilst before, there was a tendency to stick to the tried and tested method of engaging and working with our clinical communities, COVID allowed us to think again. We used technology to enable hospital teams scattered across the entire southwest to meaningfully engage in PERIPRem without ever having to leave their wards. I was worried connecting through screens and keyboards would reinforce the distance between us all, but I am surprised to realise that it has in fact accelerated relationships and in turn progress.

Having to rely on the written word in email has meant that tone and intonation have been more carefully considered and the periods of chat offered through video calls means each sentence really counts. Of more significance, is a flattening of the hierarchy within our team. Each person no matter what their seniority is vital in keeping the PERIPRem wheel turning – be it because they know how to record a MS Teams meeting, or because they have the complex clinical knowledge of a perinatal intervention.  It is not that we did not appreciate this before, but the situation forced us to see beyond the limitations of a job description.

I have reflected on whether, upon return to ‘normality’, if we as a team will revert to the pre-COVID way of working. Whilst I would like to think there would be a time when we are able to sit in offices and meet with units, I do not think that is the whole question. I can honestly say I hope we do not – I do not want to forget our swift response to the restrictions placed on us, or our unwavering faith in our ability to make improvements.

I believe that we have fundamentally changed the way we will approach projects such as this in the future. We are braver in our ways of facilitating community, we have lived experience of delivering change programmes utilising technology rather than travel and we know that when needed, we can free ourselves of the legacy of traditional and more restrictive ways of working.

NHS Artificial Intelligence Award launched

Today (28 January) the Secretary of State for Health and Care Matt Hancock has launched a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Award for health and care.

The AI Award will make £140m available over three years to accelerate the testing and evaluation of the most promising AI technologies which meet the strategic aims for the health service as set out in the NHS Long Term Plan. The Award will focus on problems and solutions identified by the NHS, and the initial four areas of focus will be screening, diagnosis, decision support and improving system efficiency.

The recent report Artificial Intelligence: how to get it right. Putting policy into practice for safe data-driven innovation in health and care showed that data driven technology is already transforming care: successfully predicting cancer survival rates, cutting numbers of missed appointments and bringing down patient referral times. In fact the UK is quickly establishing itself as a global leader in AI for health and care, having published the first ethical framework of its kind; the Code of conduct for data-driven health and care technology.

By enabling NHS and care staff to take part in research and product development at an earlier stage, the aim is to support real cultural shifts that may be required to embed AI into the health and care system. The award will be run by the NHS’s Accelerated Access Collaborative, as part of the £250 million NHS AI Lab announced last year.

The government’s new flagship NHS AI Lab will maintain standards around transparency, safety and privacy in the development of this AI technology. The Lab will road test the necessary ethical, information governance and regulatory frameworks needed to underpin new products as they are introduced and scaled up across health and care.

The Lab will also help innovators to come together to collaborate, build, learn, share and showcase ideas. They will benefit from advice on regulations and approvals and will receive training not only to develop these technologies but also to deploy and sustain them for the foreseeable future, ensuring patient safety and public trust remain at the core.

You can find out more by joining any of the following Webex events:

Initial information session on 31 January, 11-12.00 (Join here).

Applicant Webex 4 February 2020, 11:00-12:00  Join here

Applicant Webex 11 February 2020, 11:00-12:00  Join here

Applicant Webex 18 February 2020, 11:00-12:00  Join here

Applicant Webex 25 February 2020, 11:00-12:00 Join here

People with diabetes welcome opportunity to be part of pioneering NHS technology Test Bed

People with diabetes in the Westcountry have welcomed the news that they will have an opportunity to shape future innovative developments aimed at self-managing their condition.

The West of England has been selected as an innovation Test Bed to help people with diabetes in the region self-manage their condition in the future. It is one of seven test beds announced by the NHS around the country as part of a major new drive to modernise how the NHS delivers care.

The Diabetes Digital Coach Test Bed, funded by the Department of Health and led by the West of England Academic Health Science Network, will involve a collaboration between the regional health community, national charities and technology businesses.

Recruiting up to 12,000 people with diabetes

Over the next two years, the project will be looking for up to 12,000 people with diabetes across the West to come forward and participate in the Test Bed. ‘Diabetes Digital Coach’ will involve using and evaluating a range of technologies that can support self-management of the condition, from wearable sensors to online apps. It aims to deliver a range of benefits for those with diabetes, including providing a real time view of their own data which will enable them to take prompt actions to prevent their condition deteriorating and the opportunity to share their information with healthcare professionals to help shape their advice and support.

Sandra Tweddell, from Bristol, has lived with Type 1 diabetes since 1961. She is coordinator of the Bristol Diabetes Support Network and has been involved in the design of the Diabetes Digital Coach programme.

Like many others, she has seen significant advances to the monitoring and treatment of the condition over the past five decades. When she was diagnosed in 1961, insulin was injected with metal and glass syringes that had to be boiled to sterilize them.

She says: “You managed your diabetes almost by guesswork as home tests for blood glucose were non-existent and you relied on the rare visits to the consultant who told you what to do.

“Not a one size fits all”

“Everyone with diabetes needs a good understanding of their condition and how they personally react to different medications. Managing diabetes is not a one size fits all. We make life saving decisions 24/7 and self-management technologies have a key role to play in supporting these decisions. You are walking a tightrope trying to keep your blood glucose within a normal range to avoid complications and it is easy to fall off. Technology gives you the means to know when you are about to fall off and to take the steps to correct it.

“Today’s technology can also be used to enable true partnership between the GP, consultant or practice nurse and the person with diabetes. In the absence of a cure for diabetes, the innovation Test bed will enable more people to better manage their diabetes, hopefully reducing the awful complications that go with the condition.”

“I want to die with my feet on!”

Mary Perkins, also from Bristol, developed gestational diabetes with her second child in 2002 and went on to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2009. She underwent bariatric surgery in 2011 and now maintains her blood sugars within normal limits.

Mary says: “I’m very excited about The Diabetes Digital Coach Test Bed. I have Type 2 diabetes and for me the major benefit of all of this will be the real time feedback. At the moment my diabetes is ‘managed’ by annual screening, which tells us the average control I have had of my blood sugars in the previous three months. It does not provide any feedback on how what I do now (such as eating those three biscuits in a staff meeting) impacts my blood sugar today, and therefore the problems I could be storing for myself further down the line. So, while my overall control can be good, daily insults could be taking their toll.

“Using these digital self-management devices to get early feedback and identify trends is exactly what us needed. I’m really keen to take part in this – I want to die with my feet on!”

Lars Sundstrom, Director of Enterprise at the West of England AHSN, comments: “I am really delighted that we have been chosen as a Test Bed site to pioneer the next generation of connected self-management tools for people to better manage long-term conditions and encourage more timely and appropriate interventions from peers, healthcare professionals, carers and social networks. This is great example of how the NHS and the Department of Health with Innovate UK are leading the way in co-developing the future with patients and leading technology providers for the benefit of all.”

Claire Gordon, South West Regional Manager for the charity Diabetes UK, adds: “This is a great project because it will provide patients with joined-up information, allowing them to take control of their diabetes and manage it more appropriately to live well with their diabetes.”

The test-bed is one of just seven which together will receive £17m from NHS England and the Department of Health. Successful innovations will be available for other parts of the country to adopt and adapt to the particular needs of their local populations.

NHS Chief Executive Simon Stevens said: “Our new NHS Test Beds programme aims to cut through the hype and test the practical benefits for patients when we bring together some of these most promising technologies in receptive environments inside the world’s largest public, integrated health service.”

Find out more

Anyone with diabetes living in the West of England (Bristol, Bath & North East Somerset, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Swindon and South Gloucestershire) who would like to find out more or get involved in the Diabetes Digital Coach programme in the coming months can get in touch with the team at enterprise@weahsn.net.

New Test Bed trial of self-management digital technology set to improve patient care in the West

Patients in the West of England will be among the first to benefit from a major new drive to modernise how the NHS delivers care, as announced today (Friday 22 January) by NHS Chief Executive Simon Stevens at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The West of England AHSN will be leading the way in NHS innovation as part of a pioneering ‘Test Bed’ with partners including the regional healthcare community, Corsham Institute, Diabetes UK, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Ki Performance, LeLan and SocialDiabetes, R-Outcomes, and HEOR.

As part of the ‘Diabetes Digital Coach’ Test Bed, people with diabetes and frontline health and care workers across the West (with a population size of 2.4 million) will pioneer and evaluate opportunities to work with the ‘Internet of Things’ through using remote monitoring and coaching technology for better self-management.

The programme, along with six others from around the country, will be unveiled by NHS Chief Executive Simon Stevens on Friday as part of the first wave of NHS Innovation Test Beds; collaborations between the NHS and innovators that aim to harness technology to address some of the most complex issues facing our population and the health service.

Successful innovations will then be available for other parts of the country to adopt and adapt to the particular needs of their local populations.

The Diabetes Digital Coach programme will bring together mobile health self-management tools (such as wearable sensors and supporting software) with the Internet of Things (IoT). The Test Bed will enable people with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes to ‘do the right thing at the right time’ to self-manage their condition, and will encourage more timely and appropriate interventions from peers, healthcare professionals, carers and social networks.

This IoT Test Bed is part of an integrated £40 million, three-year Government programme in collaboration with Innovate UK that seeks to advance the UK’s global leadership in IoT and increase adoption of high quality IoT technologies and services throughout businesses and the public sector.

Co-developing the future with patients and leading technology providers

Lars Sundstrom, Director of Enterprise at the West of England AHSN, said: “I am really delighted that we have been chosen as an Internet of Things Test Bed site to pioneer the next generation of connected self-management tools for people to better manage long-term conditions. This is a great example of how the NHS and the Department for Health with Innovate UK are leading the way in co-developing the future with patients and leading technology providers for the benefit of all.”

Sandra Tweddell from Bristol has lived with Type 1 diabetes since 1961. She is coordinator of the Bristol Diabetes Support Network and has been involved in the design of the Diabetes Digital Coach programme.

Sandra says: “I am so excited by the news about Diabetes Digital Coach being announced as an NHS Test Bed. In the absence of a cure for diabetes, technology offers a way of giving immediate information about your diabetes control so you can manage it better and prevent or delay the complications that can go with the condition.

“Technology can be used to enable true partnership between the GP, consultant or practice nurse and the person with diabetes. Diabetes Digital Coach is a really exciting initiative as, if successful, it will enable more people to better manage their diabetes, hopefully reducing the awful complications that go with the condition.”

Providing patients with joined-up information

Claire Gordon, South West Regional Manager for the charity Diabetes UK, said: “This is a great project because it will provide patients with joined-up information, allowing them to take control of their diabetes and manage it more appropriately to live well with their diabetes.”

Jacqui Ferguson, Senior Vice President & General Manager for Enterprise Services UK & Ireland at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said: “Digital innovation and collaboration are at the heart of how HPE brings value and as such we look forward to working with the West of England AHSN on the application of this Test Bed to achieve effective diabetes self-management.”

Expanding our range of options

Kizzy Harris, Diabetes and Nutrition Services Manager for Bristol Community Health, said: “I’m delighted with this announcement. Whilst our service currently offers a range of courses and videos for people living with diabetes, we need to expand our options to ensure that people in the community have improved support to self-manage at any point that they need it. The Test bed will assist us with this. It  will also further support the Diabetes Transformation Programme – a five-year programme of change by Bristol Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), partner organisations and patients which aims to improve the outcomes for people with diabetes in Bristol.”

Inform and empower patients

Mary Hutton, Executive Sponsor of the Diabetes Digital Coach Test Bed and Accountable Officer at NHS Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) said: “This exciting technology offers the NHS an opportunity to test out innovative and new ways of working that will inform and empower patients to take control of their diabetes. NHS Gloucestershire CCG is pleased to be an active partner in this programme over the next few years.”

Consent driven applications

Richard Male at Corsham Institute, added: “The potential of digital technologies to transform the provision of healthcare, in particular, patient led care for chronic illness is significant. The Corsham Institute is delighted to be part of a talented consortium in testing and developing the Diabetes Digital Coach programme. By providing the NHS and our fellow partners with a trusted, secure and agnostic environment to house data and develop consent driven applications, we are delighted to be helping to create solutions and analytics that add significant value to patients, clinicians and researchers alike.”

Cutting through the hype

NHS Chief Executive Simon Stevens said: “Over the next decade major health gains won’t just come from a few ‘miracle cures’, but also from combining diverse breakthroughs in fields such as biosensors, medtech and drug discovery, mobile communications, and AI computing.

“Our new NHS Test Beds programme aims to cut through the hype and test the practical benefits for patients when we bring together some of these most promising technologies in receptive environments inside the world’s largest public, integrated health service.”

The Diabetes Digital Coach programme in the West of England will work with a number of SME partners, who have responded warmly to today’s Test Bed announcement:

Tommy Parker from Ki Performance said: “We’re delighted to be collaborating with such a fantastic team on this innovative project and very excited to demonstrate how the use of personalised physical activity in a free-living environment can improve diabetes management. KiActiv® will enable individuals to self-manage their condition more effectively and empower sustainable behaviour change through improved access, engagement, motivation and understanding.”

Dr Matthew Goodman from Mapmyhealth said: “We are deeply committed to improving diabetes care in the UK through the use of patient-facing technologies, in particular increasing the uptake of education to improve self-management. With the launch of the NHS Test Bed initiative, together we have an opportunity to make a significant and lasting impact on the care of patients with diabetes, leading to improved outcomes and lowered costs.”

Lucy Jones, a well-known TV dietitian and Head of Dietetics at Oviva, said: “Achieving the lifestyle changes needed to improve your diabetes or obesity can be really challenging for people and difficult to sustain. Using Oviva’s technology with my own patients I find it greatly improves the communication and support that can be given as and when they need it in their journey, whilst still managing to empower self-management as they track and capture their own dietary choices. Our goal is to improve patient’s outcomes and provide significant cost savings to the NHS, and this Test Bed is a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate this.”

Tom Dawson from Rescon said: “We are excited to be part of the extraordinary collaboration that the West of England AHSN has put together to deliver the Diabetes Digital Coach Test Bed.  Rescon leverages technologies developed for elite performance athletes, particle physics and cutting edge of social and healthcare research to deliver software and services to improve the physical, mental, emotional and social wellbeing of individuals.  Our Lincus platform will be a key component of the Diabetes Digital Coach offering.”

Adam Lester-George, Director at LeLan Solutions, commented: “We are delighted to be collaborating in this consortium of exceptional organisations with a view to developing new systems to tackle the diabetes epidemic. We are especially excited to demonstrate the fantastic technology provided by our partner, SocialDiabetes – this multiplatform self-management system has already been shown to radically improve the day-to-day lives of individuals with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Winner of the 2012 UNESCO WSA award and with more than 100,000 downloads worldwide, SocialDiabetes is the number one app for diabetics in Spain and Latin America, and we believe that it will significantly contribute to creating a truly patient-centred platform in this NHS Test Bed.”

The Diabetes Digital Coach partnership

There are a number of partners involved in the Diabetes Digital Coach Internet of Things Test Bed, with the West of England ASHN as lead organisation.

The partnership also includes two charities, 10 companies, seven Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), two acute providers, and three community providers.

NHS England Test Beds

A joint programme between NHS England, the Office for Life Science, the Department of Health and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, NHS Test Beds bring together local health and social care bodies including CCGs, hospital trusts, primary and community care providers with a wide range of innovators from home and abroad.

Each Test Bed will use a different combination of innovations, from both large and small organisations, to address a locally-identified clinical challenge.  The changes made will be rigorously evaluated, with the aim to provide evidence which will give more areas the confidence to adopt the innovations over the coming years.

Test beds are a key strand of the NHS Five Year Forward View, and will help realise the ambition of reforming the NHS so that it is fit to face the challenges of the 21st Century – particularly an ageing population and an increase in patients with long-term health conditions – while remaining financially sustainable.

The NHS has a track record of being open to new ideas and technology – they’re being implemented all the time. Where progress has been slower is in combining innovations, in a whole-system way, so that their impact is bigger than the sum of their parts – the ‘test beds’ programme will change that.

Find out about all seven Test Beds.