We are delighted that our partner Whittington Health has been selected as part of the £100m second wave of NHS digital pioneers, to deliver digital innovation across the health service.

The news, announced by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt today, gives Whittington Health a substantial £5m injection of central funding to be matched locally. This will transform the pace at which the trust can deliver the advanced IT required to underpin improvements to services and the quality of care.

Collaboration As A ‘Fast Follower’

Whittington Health has been selected as a ‘fast follower’, working alongside University Hospitals Bristol, System C’s lead partner in NHS England’s Global Digital Exemplar (GDE) programme. The GDE initiative is focused on the NHS’s most digitally advanced trusts and is designed as a springboard to accelerate clinical systems development.

Both acute trusts will be deploying an advanced digital blueprint and working through a benefits realisation programme which can then be rolled out at scale across the NHS.

Transforming IT & Patient Care at Whittington Health

Sam Barclay, chief clinical information officer at The Whittington, said: “Adoption of the blueprint will transform our IT over the coming years, both in terms of the clinicians’ digital working and our electronic engagement with patients.

“The programme also facilitates a significant move to mobile working throughout Whittington Health, which will have an enormous impact on how we use technology to support service improvement across the Trust.”

Features of The UH Bristol Blueprint

The UH Bristol blueprint includes a full suite of System C’s integrated mobile, tablet and desktop clinical applications for use in hospital and across care communities. Functions include clinical noting, assessments, orders, results, prescribing and decision support as well as access to shared care records, multi-disciplinary care plans, patient portal, population health, remote patient management and new models of care.

Focus Areas at Whittington Health

Each of System C’s blueprint clients is taking on responsibility for developing one or two new models of care solutions, using a blueprint toolset supplied by System C.

These new models of care applications transform the way services are provided, using patient portals and wearable devices to connect patients with clinicians and to help Trusts manage patients remotely.

UH Bristol is working on intensive care and prehabilitation solutions. Whittington Health has selected sickle cell disease and COPD.

Cloud Based Digital Innovation

The UH Bristol blueprint is a cloud-based solution, running on Microsoft Azure. Over the last 12 months the System C & Graphnet Alliance has moved the majority of its clinical products including the CareCentric shared care record, the CareFlow suite of clinical products and the CareFlow e-observation module (previously VitalPac) into the cloud. The move has been very successful and the alliance already has several thousand users working from a cloud platform.

Looking Ahead

“We are delighted to have Whittington Health join the Global Digital Exemplar programme. They are a far-sighted and energetic trust which will be able to deploy advanced clinical functionality at pace,” said Markus Bolton, joint chief executive of System C.

“Although the NHS England fast follower programme is restricted in the number of Trusts that can be centrally funded, we are expecting a significant number of locally funded Trusts to adopt our solution blueprint over the coming months.

The blueprint is on offer both to sites which use our Medway EPR and to non-Medway sites, providing a transformational solution for an affordable price.”

Next Steps

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