Health & Social Care Integration

The most immediately obvious area of integration would be Integrated Care Systems, with 42 currently in place within NHS England. At Access, we already have a detailed explainer on integrated care and the benefits, but there’s a little more we can flag here.

The Parliament committees website for publications hosts a PDF from the Committee of Public Accounts and their take on Integrated Care Systems. This report comes from January 2023 and reviews many aspects of ICSs, but there’s one major line that stands out:

This is why integration matters. It’s all well and good that ICSs have their key four aims (improved outcomes, improved experience/access, improved productivity and value for money, broader socio-economic development) but there hasn’t been enough ‘bigger picture’ thinking for many years now.

EMIS integration

EMIS and SystmOne integrations are quite crucial for most systems. They are two of the most widely used GP medical systems, so to support health and care providers it’s important to integrate solutions. These can then act as additional, supplemental modules to provide more context or more in-depth insights based on externally gathered data.

As an example, we’ve made sure that Access Elemental can integrate with these solutions. Integrating social prescribing software with systems like these allows for relevant information to be shared (we’ll touch on data security later) so that clinicians like GPs can see a more holistic view of a person’s overall health and wellbeing, and from there can take more educated action to provide treatment or support and ultimately deliver better outcomes.

Social care and wellness integration

The core concept of social care and wellness crossing over is to provide preventative care and support to people – often elderly or with longer term health challenges – to promote independence and to reduce the risk of deterioration.

Social care and wellness is one of the new areas within the broader health and care picture that’s seeing a big push for integration. This is being achieved through various software solutions that can provide community support – be that oversight, organisational aid, or networking.

PCN Collaboration

Primary Care Networks within NHS England are in their very nature collaborations between different primary care providers. These are typically GP services, but often include things like community pharmacies and NHS walk-in centres, as well as services like dentistry and optometry.

PCNs are working together to meet the objectives set by Integrated Care Systems, which are targeting things such as:

·       Health inequalities (based on class, age, gender, race, education)

·       Access to primary care services

·       Preventative action/measures

·       More personalised care

Mental health social prescribing tools

In our article titled ‘10 ways social prescribing can improve mental health’, we spoke of the importance of tools to support social prescribing, so that it in turn can support people with their mental health challenges.

The big three solutions of Joy, Simply Connect, and our own Access Elemental are integrating with Access Rio, EMIS Web, and SystmOne to be able to communicate important additional information on wellbeing that can reinforce health and care planning and decision-making, typically leading to better outcomes.

To find out more about social prescribing solutions, why not visit our Access Elemental page.

Digital wellbeing platform

As patient activation becomes more common, we’re seeing many more people taking charge of their own care and wellbeing and utilising digital wellbeing platforms to help support this.

Solutions like Remente, Well.Me, and Raiys are allowing individuals to track metrics such as heart rate and pulse, blood pressure, body temperature and blood oxygen, but also going a step further in desktop and app platforms to provide data insights into your wellbeing and what’s good, what’s bad, and where you can make lifestyle changes to improve your condition.

The integration here comes in the form of communicable information that can be shared from your devices and their associated platforms to health and care professionals – giving them new, high quality data insights into your health.

Patient Engagement Software

We’ve mentioned patient activation above, but that’s the end goal of patient engagement. Health and care providers want patients to be engaged with their health, care and wellbeing services. People need to be engaged to diligently follow treatment plans or lifestyle requirements, in order to achieve the desired outcomes.

Software like patient portals are a great example of patient engagement software, but for more information we have a prior guide on the best patient engagement software.

Integration is crucial here because the quality of software is everything. People won’t use a clunky website or app, so you need to choose a smooth, easy-to-understand platform for them to engage with. This is doable when integrating different solutions and picking and choosing, and can be achieved within a pre-packaged bundle of solutions, but these bundles have to be researched properly: can they integrate externally, as desired, or not?

Workflow automation in healthcare

Workflow can be defined as required, predictable tasks that form the basis of operations. In healthcare and other wellbeing services, these usually impact areas of administration – enquiries, patient note updates, staff rostering…

Healthcare technology offers the solutions here. Products like Access Adam Care Commissioning can aid the processing of patients for discharge into community care by optimising commissioning, for example, but by integrating different solutions together more can be achieved. You can build a bespoke network of solutions that will handle the entire patient journey; not taking it away from human eyes, but managing the basics so that experts are free to engage for the serious stuff.

Health data management systems

Health data management systems are built on the foundations of one or more software solutions to… manage data. They achieve this management through the collection of data, storage of data, security (permissions and protection), analysis (insights and trends) and sharing (communication and collaboration).

Health and care data – even information from the previously mentioned wellbeing platforms – can be captured, stored, organised and assessed within these solutions. Simple things such as demographics, or readings from wearable technology, elevating to things such as medical notes, prescriptions, lab results and scans.

The chief benefit is that a health data management system can support clinical decision-making, even leading to better care outcomes through the better intelligence provided to health and care professionals. Without integration though, this simply isn’t possible. No one provider can account for all aspects of a person’s care and wellbeing experience. There are so many different solution providers and manufacturers that there has to be integration and cooperation if we’re to elevate care – something the NHS has pushed for with their Digital Capabilities Framework.

Data security in health information systems

This sub-section is probably the most predictable concern of users – how secure is data in these health information systems?

Solutions should be – and in many case are being – built with protections in place to firewall against external intrusion and to codify permission-based access for user accounts internally. These permissions can be tailored per user, to ensure that there’s no information being shared which shouldn’t be shared.

Access to different types of information is sometimes passed around within an established network or system, but it’s on the solutions to have restrictions to send on just the relevant data rather than all. This is something that Access Elemental does adhere to.

This brings us onto the benefits of health and social care integration – what gains are health and social care providers seeing for them and their workers, and what improvements are patients and clients seeing.

For workers

Integration, for health and care professionals, means enhanced work efficiency. The amalgamation of different software solutions allows for automated workflows to take away the administrative burden that is often cited as a hindrance to face-to-face care and greater patient interaction levels.

This also then offers more agility for the workers: with more patient or client time, there’s more room for manoeuvring and being agile with balancing workload and priorities.

Good software has good data capture capabilities, but multiple good solutions is doubly beneficial for the data capture. Knowledge is power, so the adage goes, and more information leads to better data quality, which supports improved decision making.

The last benefit is the full utilisation of legacy software or systems. Integration with the right solutions can enhance and advance older software, so that clinical staff aren’t having to start from scratch with their tech education – nor is the patient data in the system now obsolete and unusable.

The important thing is to utilise integration to help health and care workers have better data accessibility and insights, so that they can take the best possible course of action per person.

For organisations

For health and social care organisations, the better working practices and output achieved by integrating multiple software solutions means cost efficiency – pure and simple. This would be cost savings and cost reductions, but both revolve primarily around staff retention and less spending on recruitment and starter training. Increased productivity also drives higher profits, or reduces the public spend to allow funding for other areas in need.

Integration also allows organisations to double down on both data security and compliance, with checks, permissions, and firewalls all lining the route inside these programs to ensure legitimate access and appropriate usage.

The streamlining of operations, the scalability of them, and the flexibility achieved through optimised working habits and practices all leads to one big outcome: a better user experience.

There’s a myth that the integration of software solutions doesn’t work, but the reality is that it’s a battle of preference: some solutions providers like to sell all-in-one bundles to ensure compatibility, and some like The Access Group like to offer standalone solutions that can integrate with competitor and legacy solutions. For more on that you can read our guide on all-in-one vs best in breed solutions.

As this article on integration shows, there’s plenty of examples of integration within health and social care – examples that wouldn’t have been pursued if there wasn’t a good chance of success. Public or private, no provider wants to waste money on a pointless venture, so you shouldn’t be afraid of building a system or network based on integrating solutions. It works and it works well.