Healthcare Excellence Through Technology took place at London ExCeL at the start of October. Over two days, speakers, exhibitors and visitors expressed a desire for policy, commitment, and innovation to bring about transformative change.

In a special address to the HETT audience, newly appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State of the Department of Health and Social Care, Dr Zubir Ahmed MP told visitors that he was “restless for change.”

Dr Ahmed, who is a surgeon by background, highlighted in his speech his particular interest in robotic surgery, emphasising technologies that can support patients both before and after operations, helping them prepare for treatment and facilitating their recovery.

The transplant and vascular surgeon, who became a Health Minister this Summer, said he could see huge potential for digital. “Our challenge now is delivery,” he said, “and to get this technology into the hands of the many, not the few.”

National Plans, National Foundations

A succession of key digital voices from NHS England told HETT that the groundwork has been laid with the 10 Year Plan and its three shifts from hospital to community, treatment to prevention, and analogue to digital.

Of these shifts, they argued, digital is the most critical component, as it enables these three shifts to take place. Alec Price Forbes, the National Chief Clinical Information Officer, said the NHS should be “digital by default.” It will not be enough to extend digital tools into existing workflows, he stressed: “We need to see digital used to transform services.”

Ming Tang, Interim Chief Digital and Information Officer at NHS England, said three big national projects will underpin change across the system. The first is the NHS App, during Tang’s Afternoon Keynote in the Infrastructure, Data and Cyber Security theatre, she described the NHS App as the “trojan door” for changing people’s journey through health and care services.

The second is the single patient record, which Tang said will collate information and make it available to clinicians and patients for specific use cases, starting with maternity. Finally, the third is the Federated Data Platform, which will not only enable the NHS to make better use of its data, but also enable it to become “a growth platform for the UK” through supporting research and innovation.

“It is all coming together and now we need to make sure we work together to ensure we can do all the things we want,” Tang said. “Ten years is a long time. We need to focus on the next two to three years to deliver things [that will] change the environment, create tools people want, and make an impact on some of the big challenges we face.”

Ayub Bhayat, Director of Data Services and Deputy Chief Data and Analytics Officer at NHS England, joined a panel at the Digital Maturity Forum discussing the Single Patient Record. He explained that three prototypes are being developed: one following a “hub and spoke model,” leveraging existing investments in shared care records; one built around a “central model”; and one based on a “data layer”.

Liz Clow, Director of Digital Products at NHS England, told a session on the future of the NHS App that three early priorities include developing “intelligent triage,” building the digital hospital and NHS Online, and, more immediately, “rolling out HPV self-service screening for women who may not access traditional screening services.”

Implementation and the Team   

HETT didn’t just cover government policy or National Programmes. On Day Two, Sonia Patel, Chief Information Officer at NHS England, took part in a fireside chat about the future of NHS infrastructure and hospital trust IT deployments.  

Patel outlined a streamlined relationship between the centre, regions, and the frontline, underpinned by a new ‘public digital infrastructure,’ and the creation of a flexible, standards-based blueprint for the deployment of technology to support new models of care.

Shortly afterwards, Will Monaghan, Group Chief Digital Information Officer at University Hospitals of Leicester and Nottingham University Hospitals NHS trusts, reflected on the progress it is making in deploying the Nervecentre electronic patient record across the East Midlands.

He said something to bear in mind “if you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go with others.” In other words, the project sometimes had to slow down to get everybody on board, but now they are starting to reap benefits from having everybody working in the same way with the same system.

In a lively session with Dame Laura Kenny, HETT’s very first celebrity guest speaker, the spotlight was on the importance of setting common goals and discovering the best ways to communicate them to people with different perspectives. The five-time Olympic cycling champion reflected on her career and her experience of the NHS in conversation with Ayesha Rahim, Chief Medical Information Officer at Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.

To close her session, Dame Laura was asked for any “words of wisdom” for her audience, she said: “There is no journey that comes without hurdles… but every barrier can be broken down. And communication really [does] matter. Really understanding the team has been key to my success.”

Bringing AI to Life  

There were also plenty of suppliers on the programme, talking about the potential of their solutions, services and products. Jane Stephenson, the Chief Executive of SPARK TSL, reflected on Dr Ahmed’s special address.

“I am happy to hear that he is restless for change, because I think we all need to be restless for change,” she said, before outlining how her company’s modern wi-fi, bedside devices, and SPARK Fusion platform, can transform entertainment, information, and hospital processes for staff and patients.

Out on the exhibition floor, HETT had also created new features to bring visitors closer to suppliers and innovators. One of the busiest was the AI spotlight, which gave vendors and customers the chance to reflect on the implementation of what is still very new technology.

Eddie Gibson, Clinical Director of Radiology, at Northern Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland, outlined their experience with BoneView, which it has deployed from the Sectra Amplifier, a marketplace, hosting and co-ordination service for imaging AIs.

Gibson said BoneView has improved the detection of fractures in the trust’s emergency departments, to the point where the performance of doctors in ED is almost as good as that of specialists in radiology. Results like this are impressive.

Outside of imaging, trusts can find it difficult to find the financial, infrastructure, and clinical resources to try out AI tools and services. This problem was addressed by Simon Windsor, Intel UK’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Manager, and Cory Neighbour, Insight Solution Leader for Public Sector.

“We have built a deployment model and toolkit,” Neighbour explained. “We understand the business challenge, and then we build a prototype that uses existing hardware and systems, so trusts can fail fast or scale up what works for them.”

HETT: A Platform for Inspiration

Windsor said HETT was the perfect show at which to present this kind of thinking. “It brings the whole ecosystem together, from decision makers to end-users,” he said. “That makes it a great environment to discuss these solutions.”

This was also the experience of exhibitors on busy stands. Dean Moody from Airwave Healthcare, the provider of digital signage, displays, and the mycareTV patient entertainment system, said: “We have been really busy, and we have had the right people coming to the stand: that means CIOs, CCIOs, digital teams.

“We have just won some big contracts – the next new hospital to open, the National Rehabilitation Centre, is going to be using our intelligent bedside terminals – and this is the perfect place to tell people about them. People are genuinely interested in innovation.” Or, to coin a phrase, restless for change.