The Council for Science and Technology, in partnership with the Government Office for Science, has published a new report focused on harnessing technology to support the long-term sustainability of the UK's healthcare system.
Aimed at generating "transformative change" to the health and wellbeing of the UK population, the report highlighted two key areas of opportunity.
Firstly, it looked into "engaging and supporting individuals and communities, enabled by data and evidence", which involves improving health through information, interaction and smart use of data.
This involves recognising trends and responding to them, developing the population's "health literacy" and aiding informed decisions through technology.
Secondly, it focused on finding new ways to allow for "prevention, treatment and care", while factoring in the changing health landscape.
More and more people are utilising digital consultation tools, meaning that the way healthcare is administered is increasingly moving away from hospitals and surgeries.
To aid this transfer, the report looked at "cost-effective and convenient remote technologies for continuous monitoring, routine testing of individuals and more sophisticated decision support tools".
In its bid to address these areas of opportunity, the report offers the following recommendations for government.
1. The government should set up at least two significant scale Demonstrators to test the system-wide application of healthcare technologies.
2. The government should establish a ‘National Centre for Health System Improvement’ to build capacity and skills for system transformation.
3. The government should work with NICE, regulators and the research community to promote the development of an evidence base to underpin effective use of digital health technologies as part of care pathways.
North of England Care System Support is an NHS organisation established in 2013 to provide support to NHS health care commissioners across the UK, and it too has played a role in finding applicable uses of technology within healthcare.
In recent times, NECS has operated as a strategic partner to support the integration of health and care systems, a process managing director Stephen Childs discussed in his recent contribution to The Parliamentary Review.
"We have focused our efforts on supporting integrated care systems with the development of their Population Health Management capability (use of data to design new models of proactive care and deliver improvements in health and wellbeing which make best use of our collective resources)," he wrote.
"We have invested significantly in the modernisation of our renowned commissioning intelligence tool RAIDR to ensure the risk stratification, case finding and patient cohort identification functionality is tailored to meet the needs of the GP, the primary care network, the place (Local Authority area) and the integrated care system as a whole. RAIDR is uniquely positioned to do this having been deployed across more than 900 general practices in England."
