Advice from ICB Digital Change Leaders: Keep it simple

Digital leadership in Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) continues to be a careful balancing act with efforts to maintain and improve systems moving forward on parallel tracks, the NHS and other change leaders said in a session on the final day of the NHS Confederation Expo conference in Manchester agreed. ,

The panel of three trust leaders and strategists agreed that the board must find ways to make room for change while avoiding political pressure from the Centre.

This involves having a clear strategy, keeping the change simple and practical, and making it a job for the entire organization. It also requires that frontline workers feel empowered to shape change.

“Digital improvement should be seen as a solution, not an add-on,” said Mandy Nagra, Designated ICB/ICS Executive Chief Delivery Officer for NHS Birmingham and Solihull. He added that organizations need to make sure they get the basics right, something that may be most difficult for organizations that have the least breathing space to implement change.

The process of upgrading digital maturity remains a challenging one, said Emma McGowan, director of design and transformation at Surrey County Council and former director of digital at the London Borough of Hackney.

“We’ve looked at what we have and are trying to turn around the edges and there’s going to be a cliff edge,” she said. “To handle interrupts in a way that doesn’t destabilize the distribution, you need to use parallel processes.”

McGowan also noted that while some ICs have the headspace and funding to invest in “thinking” type roles to envision a long-term digital strategy, others are currently trying to keep basic services on track. have been

“You can’t have a new kitchen when the house is on fire,” she said. “You can do more exciting things later.”

Latest Innovative Methods of Estimation of Pressures

Shane Devlin, chief executive of the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Integrated Care Board (BNSSG ICB), agreed that “strategy is not always about banging things,” and that it is important to have a holistic ICS strategy, each The partner should also have his own strategy.

He added that the BNSSG ICB is continuing to develop its Care Traffic Control Center with the aim of improving performance and patient flow and making services more efficient.

The center, which is linked to the ICB’s Shared Data Environment (SDE), could do some detailed public health planning, he said, but “what if?”

Davin said: “I want a single managed system that should be able to see the flow of traffic to GP surgeries or care homes. Using modeled flows and learning from the data, the system can eventually predict potential logjams .

The developers are hoping to use the AI ​​to build a model of what the system might look like in 24 to 48 hours and how a particularly busy GP surgery might affect other parts of the system, for example.

“If air traffic control wasn’t working, you wouldn’t be able to get on the plane,” Devlin said. “It makes sense to have some kind of traffic system and see what it tells us.”

He added that a well-developed program could also enable the board to determine how spending extra money on one service might affect the rest of the system.

DeWine and the other panelists also agreed that it is unrealistic to expect every member of an organization to take the time to play a key role in all the changes it is expected to drive.

“If we can get people involved in the Big Four, hopefully it can create a multiplier effect,” he said.

The NHS Confederation, along with NHS providers, set out to help digitize within ICs by launching a new support program last year.