Jill's blog of burning issues: Our technology road map
A 'burning issues' piece focussing on IT improvements and investment.
This is my third blog following up on the ‘burning issues’ that came out of the staff listening events earlier this year. One of the three priorities for 2016/17 that I road tested with you all was ‘support and engage staff to improve people’s health and lives’.
On the theme of ‘supporting’ staff, I’ve chosen to focus on Information Technology (IT) in this blog. IT is a subject that was raised consistently throughout the listening events and something that the Board hears about regularly. Be it hardware, software, the clinical information system, remote access, systems not talking to each other, training etc…we clearly need to put some considerable focus on IT to get it working better.
Last year the Trust Board appointed Bill Fawcett as our Chief Information Officer (or Head of IT in other words). Bill is highly experienced and came to us from international business support firm Carillion.
Since arriving, Bill has outlined his technology road map for 2016 and his three year road map to ensure that we have the right systems in place to meet our future challenges. He’s been presenting this to various people across the Trust. I thought it would be useful to outline Bill’s plan here for everyone so that you can see that:
- we have a plan, and
- we have someone highly knowledgeable and experienced driving it forward.
There are a number of pressures facing us where technology can really help. Many of us have to work in a number of locations, often out and about in the community or in people’s homes. We also need to work collaboratively with partners such as GPs, so systems that can talk to each other will be an important part of our new models of care.
With this in mind, one of the major foundations to our technology development will be to provide our teams with good quality remote access into our systems and up-to-date mobile devices. This will enable us to make use of the exciting new developments that are influencing our everyday lives. Mobile applications (apps) are already appearing in mental health settings across the world and we need to be ready to make the best use of them for our service users.
Bill’s team is taking a serious look at PARIS (our clinical information system) and the alternative systems that could be used in our Trust, as well as procuring a document management system to record our paper-based patient records digitally. We need systems that are easy to navigate through and allow us to update our records where ever we are. Additionally, cutting out the duplicated effort is a must. Making our paper records available digitally with intelligent searching will assist us to make the right decisions at the right time.
Finally, we don’t want to just feed our systems with endless amounts of information, we want to provide clinical staff with analysis of this rich source of data to help us provide even better support for our service users.
Some changes, such as a new contract for our mobile phones, are nearing completion and some of you will have heard of our recent experiments with digital pens and touch screen tablets.
We’ll be launching our new intranet site (currently known as Staffnet) this autumn and we have just started to go live with our new e-prescribing system this month.
But this is just the start of our journey along the technology road. As we start to build our requirements for our primary clinical systems I would urge you to get involved in the discussions and make sure your requirements are taken into account. This will help us make the right decisions for our systems for the years to come.
Jill Copeland
Interim Chief Executive