By Dr Darren Kilroy, Medical Director, RLDatix.
The seniority of the delegates at this year’s HSJ Integrated Care Summit unarguably reflects the pivotal phase we are entering in the maturation of systems in health and care. Chairs, CEOs, clinical, financial and – importantly – patient leaders made up the entirety of the attendees, be that NHS or local government. The agenda has unashamedly tackled those most pressing issues of true strategic prioritisation, a revisiting of the merits of legacy outcome measures when we face unprecedented challenges in public health, and the place of technology and digitalisation within all of this.
With that in mind, Rupert Clarke, Programme Director, RLDatix and I held some fascinating and valuable interactive discussion groups with a wide variety executive and non-executive system leaders; the conversations flowed with immediacy and a stronger sense of purpose than I have experienced in many years of roundtables of this kind. We simply did not have time to fully address the issues delegates wanted to discuss, but what we did quickly establish were some key commonalities:
- The value of digital workforce solutions to system leaders needs to be articulated in better ways and realised at scale.
- The variability across providers with which available solution functionality is deployed must be improved.
- The analogue-to-digital health and care paradigm shift give software vendors new opportunities in the market.
- Those opportunities arise against a backdrop of a funding shift from secondary to primary and preventive care.
As we move through the remainder of 2024 and into the health and care financial settlement that will occur in the spring of 2025, there is time – but not much time – for reflection and regrouping around these common themes. What matters most now is the forensic focus with which we tackle the issues of realising value through system outcomes, not point-relevant outputs, the ironing out of creases in uptake and utilisation, and the narrative we develop of the whole-pathway benefits of workforce and incident management solutions. All of this is achievable; all of this is, absolutely pivotal to success.
