Just to tell you a little bit about our project, I’m from the West of England Academic Health
Science Network and we are leading this large scale project where we are working with people
with diabetes with all our stakeholders and this is what we are doing with our project,
we’re about halfway through, offering people a choice of carefully selected tools to help
them better self manage their condition and be more in control of their own care.
So we’re bringing together big topics around diabetes, around self-management and around
digital and test beds are around combining these things and we’re definitely combining
not just the technology and the people but a lot of cultural issues around understanding
medical models and self-management, around understanding working with industry and partnerships
and as well as working together more productively.
This is a little bit about what we’re doing, we’ve got a single sign on website that
you can access through a smart phone, a tablet or a desk top.
We’ve got five tools that have been selected that track health and wellbeing, insulin management,
dietician support, they vary in terms some of them are coaching programs twelve week
programs, some you dip in and use, but it is very much about the user choosing which
tool suits them at that particular time.
That’s very briefly some of our objectives.
We’re looking at how we can extend this to other long term conditions as well and
one of the key things that’s interesting we’ve got citizens owning their own data
and being very much in control of who they wish to share it with.
To focus a little bit on how we’re working with our partners we’re the lead, we’ve
got nine technology partners, some of those bring the digital self-management tools, some
are building the platform involved in the information governance and appropriate storage
and others are evaluation partners.
We’re also very well supported by Diabetes UK and some of their service champions.
So to think about how we’re working together and to just consider that.
We’ve got a lot of partners, we’ve got a complicated project we’re delivering in
two short years which is quite a challenge for seeing changes in a long term condition,
but to pick up on some of the earlier points it’s about finding … it’s finding the
right partners.
It’s all about the people that you deal with, it’s all about the relationships,
it’s about checking in regularly with people to make sure that we’re on the same page,
we’ve got similar assumptions, it’s about building trust, it’s about building relationships
and it’s about communicating.
I think those things are the same whether you’re dealing with a company, an SME, a
large corporate, another organisation, another NHS organisation those principles still apply.
I think also one of the things that we are developing is around the partnership working
and being clear about how you’re going to work together, how you’re interacting, enabling
collaborative behaviour, enabling people to bring solutions and also feeding that back
and your new way of working back to your own internal stakeholders within your own organisation
to make it clear and to challenge some of those other assumptions and to bring that
learning forward and make it available.
So that’s a very brief introduction to Diabetes Digital Coach and how we are working with
our industry partners.