The Liquidlogic, System C & Graphnet Blueprint for Delivering the White Paper Vision for Health and Social Care Integration.

By David Grigsby, managing director, Liquidlogic

Liquidlogic, System C and Graphnet together form the System C & Graphnet Care Alliance; a group of companies with common ownership providing integrated IT solutions to the UK health and social care market and supporting the national Covid vaccination rollout.

Health and care white paper – is it different this time?

Aspiring to achieve health and social care integration is nothing new, but this time the ambition in the health and care white paper does seem to be different. Perhaps the Covid effect is playing a part, but if the proposed policies are translated into legislation, they will have more teeth than those that came before them and it finally feels like progress is being made.

The white paper for the first time proposes a legal duty on the NHS and social care to collaborate and underpins this with the inclusion of local authorities on the boards of Integrated Care Systems (ICS). This is coupled with a recognition of the importance of systems and data, “to ensure more effective data use across the health and care system, which is critical to effective integration”.

Whilst the vision is for ICSs to solidify as organisations, they will have to cope with the fact that distinctive and specialist organisations will remain and operate within them, just as they do now. The challenge is to enable each organisation to operate in seamless unison with the others under the ICS umbrella, and in doing so, achieve the objective of integrated care.

Liquidlogic and the System C & Graphnet Care Alliance – are we ready to support this?

We have a blueprint for supporting ICSs to achieve the ambitions in the white paper and this is based on live, successful and referenceable implementations. It can be grouped under 3 headings:

1. Sharing and integrating data across the ICS.
2. Sending messages and managing workflow across the ICS.
3. Analysing data operationally and at citizen cohort level across the ICS.

These are the three legs required to effectively support an integrated health and social care system and we will look at each in turn.