BJSS Guest Blog | Transforming Healthcare in Scotland: Embracing the Digital Revolution
At BJSS, we are proud to be at the forefront of digital transformation in healthcare, but only recently have we gained in-depth experience with Scottish healthcare. Our recent engagements have provided brilliant insights into the innovation north of the border, as well as the challenges that persist.
The work being done within NHS Scotland at Health Board and Special Health Board level is revolutionising healthcare for patients and citizens. The implementation of innovative digital platforms is streamlining patient care, enhancing data management, and improving communication among healthcare providers. These advancements are crucial for delivering patient-centred care, improving clinician efficiency, and ensuring efficient utilisation of critical resources.
Strengths of the Scottish Digital Healthcare System
Scotland's digital healthcare system is a beacon of innovation and forward-thinking. Scottish Government’s commitment to leveraging digital technology to improve healthcare outcomes is evident in several key areas:
- Comprehensive Digital Strategy: Scotland’s Digital Health & Care Strategy offers a clear vision for integrating digital solutions into healthcare, focusing on patient-centered care, data security, and system interoperability.
- Patient Empowerment: We’re seeing investment in tools to enable patients to access their health records and manage their health proactively, fostering greater patient engagement, aligning to the vision for Scotland’s Data Strategy for Health and Social Care, to empower the people of Scotland.
- Collaborative Ecosystem: A strong emphasis on collaboration between public health organisations, private sector partners, and academic institutions has created a vibrant ecosystem of innovation, highlighted by the Accelerated National Innovation Adoption (ANIA) Pathway.
- Data-Driven Insights: Utilising pioneering data analytics and AI to gain insights into healthcare trends and patient outcomes is helping tailor services to the specific needs of the population.
Challenges: Meeting the growing demand for healthcare services.
However, the system still faces significant and growing challenges, not least concerning waiting times for A&E and elective procedures, as highlighted by Scottish Government’s recent £300m investment to tackle waiting lists. Addressing these issues is obviously a huge challenge, but is imperative to ensure timely access to care and improve the overall quality of healthcare services.
Waiting times for elective procedures in Scotland have been a longstanding issue (as they have across the UK), with patients often experiencing significant delays.The prolonged waiting times, excarbated by COVID-19, not only impact patient outcomes but also contribute to increased healthcare costs and inefficiencies within the system.
Digital solutions: A pathway to improvement.
Digital solutions, when implemented correctly and adopted successfully, have the power to make a massive difference in tackling the challenges facing NHS Scotland, as is evident with the Seer 2 platform, but therein lies a wider challenge – successful implementation and adoption, in an economy which has seen budgets tightened at Health Board and National level.
Invest to save: A National perspective.
The Scottish Government wants to empower its population by providing flexible digital access to information, manage their own data and services that support their health and wellbeing, wherever they are1. Implementing centralised digital platforms or modernising legacy solutions would naturally contribute to the goals set out in the Care in the Digital Age: Deliver Plan 2023-24, and could lead to several benefits and improvements in healthcare outcomes, with patient waiting times being high up on that list.
There’s no doubt that whilst digital innovations naturally incur more costs in the short to medium term than the alternative of doing nothing, investing technologies such as Cloud and AI will undoubtedly bring cost savings and enhanced care in the future. Embracing digital programs at both national and regional levels, healthcare providers can streamline processes, enhance communication, and improve patient access to care. Take the National Digital Platform (NDP) for example, which is a fantastic example of a future-thinking national programme to build public digital services both now, and in years to come.
We’re organising a digital health event at our Glasgow office in the coming months, in which we will dig further into some of these topics. Please do get in touch if you’re interested in coming along – please email me at [email protected], or connect with me on LinkedIn if you’re interested in speaking to me directly about who BJSS is, the work we deliver and how we could help.
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