My name is Dave Horsfield; I'm the Programme Manager for Liverpool Clinical Commissioning
Group for the Mi or More Independent Programme.
The programme is generally about the use of technology but more importantly about how
we put that technology together in services and how it goes out there to communities,
how it engages with professionals and how actually it makes a real impact at scale.
Our approach to commissioning on the programme has been very much around using technology
as a tool.
Not focusing on the fact that it is technology or changing the way that we want to do things
because it is technology but actually focusing on what is the outcome we want from the use
of those tools which is essentially what technology is.
So that means we have to focus on what our professionals do, what our community need
out of it and how those tools really reflect what they need, rather than focusing on the
fact that it is technology or that it comes off a shelf and has to do certain things.
It's more about what that technology has to achieve and how we bend the technology to
what it needs to be rather than focusing too much on the technology itself.
Some of the key challenges that we have found when trying to roll out technology in our
services has been attitudes of the public.
So we can start with things like people deciding that technology somehow replaces the physician
or the GP, or that they will get less quality service because they are not going to get
in contact with human beings and really that is a reasonable thing to assume if you don't
know what that technology is for or how it goes about.
So what we first found with our public was, actually, we need them to understand what
the technology is there, how it is going to be used and how it is of benefit to them;
what does it mean to them?
Because if they are service users that don't want the technology, why are we buying it?
Secondly, it's about professionals.
They are the people, they are the people with the skills; they are the people that we need
the services from so the technology has to reflect their wants and needs as well.
We have two really key groups; the public and the practitioners.
This technology and how we buy it, how we roll it out and how it serves those two particular
groups is fundamental, otherwise the technology simply doesn't get used, again it's a tool,
the tool has to be useful for all of the people involved.
Fundamentally we see telehealth and telecare type technology as very, very useful towards
the bigger self-care agenda.
Essentially, it allows, first of all, our patients, the public service users, to get
fundamentally a much better grasp of how they manage their own condition.
They start to see their own vital signs and what that means to them and how they can start
to really understand and drive their own health and take some responsibility for that health
instead of passing it on to other healthcare professionals.
Secondly, it allows us as a health, um, care profession to really start to drive intelligence
led healthcare which is around understanding when our patients need our help and what help
that is at the right time, in the right place.
This kind of technology really starts to give us that day to day feedback that allows us
to drive those technologies, and then we can start to see not only efficiencies in our
service, but most importantly how we drive forward the quality of what we are delivering
to our patients.
The Mi programme was funded by the Technology Strategy Board, now known as Innovate UK.
Its intention was to be a forerunner, to find out some of the answers to starting to put
technology to use at scale.
What we found as we have done that is that we have had great feedback from our patients
and service users.
They're not just finding a way to use the technology their selves, which shouldn't be
surprising but actually they are finding that they have more choice in the services they
use but most importantly, they are actually using the technology to decide how they can
live their lives.
They are using that information to start to generate their own way of self-caring.
Going forward, the Mi programme really wants to look at how we start to pull technology
and service together as one.
So stop thinking about technology as something that we bolt on or add in to services but
actually it is just the everyday tools that we start to use to get the services out to
our patients, to our service users but at high quality but at scale.
How we can really start to get our services to be intelligence led, that we drive the
right service, right place, right time.
Technology can help us do that and really drive up quality, then and only then, we can
start to look at what the efficiencies might be of that but really our focus at this point
in time is the effect on patients, how we can really give the right tools to our professionals
going forward, and if its cost neutral or better, then it's a huge success for us.