In this blog, part of a series of comment pieces from NHS Confederation leaders, members and partners, Roz Davies explains that while COVID-19 has brought digitisation of the NHS and its acceptance by service users into its own, our attention must focus on the need for the digitally excluded to be involved when developing digital products and services.
The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing changes and may help to establish telehealth more firmly in its aftermath. Some of the changes may not be long-lasting. However, the momentum is such that telehealth will almost certainly find a stronger place within health service frameworks for each of the three countries and is likely to have increased acceptance among both patients and health care providers.
There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic will come to an end. However, what will stay with us after this period is over is more than chaotic scenes, a fear of mingling with others or the need to wear a face mask. More specifically, some of the digital health technologies that we’ve been advocating for have proven to be indispensable in this crisis and we will appreciate their contribution better from now on.
The Learning Hub will be a new digital platform that will provide easy access to a wide range of resources that are pertinent to education and training in health and care. Users will be able to contribute digital resources (including video, audio, images, documents, web links, articles etc) and search and access the variety of learning resources that will have been contributed by stakeholders and the health and care workforce to support system readiness and recovery from the pandemic. New features will frequently be released in line with the original plan for the functionality of the Learning Hub in its Beta phase.
As we learn more about the disease, we see digital health technologies increasingly getting adopted in this context. We created an infographic to summarize all the digital health tech efforts against this pandemic.
A group of NHS organisations in the London area have begun to use an app that effectively gives staff a second phone number on their mobiles, enabling them to separate work from personal calls.
The provider, Thumbtel, said it has made the Another Number service available to NHS organisations free of charge for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic.
The number of care providers using NHSmail, the NHS’ centrally-funded email service, has more than doubled in the last six weeks from 4,141 providers to 10,186, to support staff during the COVID-19 pandemic1.
NHSmail gives staff in care homes and domiciliary care the ability to safely share residents’ data and queries with doctors, nurses and GPs involved in their resident’s direct care, and get timely responses. It also connects them to pharmacists, dentists and anyone else in health and care who also has secure email, such as NHSmail.
Covid-19 shows that we must overcome organisational barriers to deliver clean, realtime, standardised data in support of direct care, system planning, and urgent response.
X. Glorot, and Y. Bengio. Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, volume 9 of Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, page 249--256. Chia Laguna Resort, Sardinia, Italy, PMLR, (13--15 May 2010)