Step 4 Digital Maturity and Requirements
Why is digitalisation important?
- It allows a health and care system to understand the needs of its population and opportunities to improve the care being delivered
- It supports transparency of financial information to ensure that value-for-money is being achieved
- It allows a health and care system to understand unwarranted variation both within in the health system and between the health system and its peers
- It helps budget holders and care providers ensure the quality and efficiency of the care being provided and its impact on health inequalities
- It provides access to intelligence to support planning, implementation and evaluation of the population health strategy.
When done correctly, it can:
- provide a systematic view across the health and care economy
- predict important changes in the defined population
- allow a tweaking process, as workforce and service delivery are carefully matched to the predicted population’s changing needs.
Key Questions to ask for each cluster as part of their digital blue print with respect to PHM
- 1. Is the IT road map aligned to the PHM interventions?
- 2. Does our IT solutions provide adequate integration across the different care systems and pathways
- 3. Have we invested enough in the systems where they are most required and will provide the most value- for e.g. in Self care, virtual care, Patient activation, PHM platform, Apps for patients etc
- 4. What is our ability to capture and analyse the data for all segments of our population
- 5. Does the IT systems we have promote proactive preventive care with alerts and predictions rather than recording just reactive care?
