Critical Engagement with Digital Health Technologies for NHS STPs

What happens when forty researchers, patients, entrepreneurs and health and social care staff come together to discuss digital technologies and their impact on NHS sustainability and transformation?

That was the experiment at the University of Southampton' s Web Sciences Institute on 16 January, at a workshop sponsored by the Institute, the CLAHRC and Wessex AHSN.

And the result?

A highly energetic and constructive exchange of views from the diverse stakeholders in the room. 

The take away messages:

1. The NHS has to embrace digital technologies to survive but precisely how it embraces these is critical;

2. Successful adoption of digital technologies needs to take account of:

The political imperative of developing a compact between public services, service providers and citizens about how their data may be used;

The social processes involved in patient and workforce adaption to technologies and the substantial research base that already exists in this field *the technical challenges involved in ensuring that a proliferation of health data and digital devices develops in a way that supports integrated, patient-centred care rather than promoting fragmented data and digital silos;

Developing the capacity to adapt to and exploit fundamentally disruptive innovation from within the NHS and from SMEs many of which have their origins in academic research or front-line clinical practice

Next steps?

How might we maintain and develop the coalition of interests that met in the workshop to underpin a research-driven, innovation-friendly digital technologies implementation plan for the NHS in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Watch this space.