Helping the NHS use medical devices
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is a UK government department responsible for setting health policy and improving the capability, efficiency and safety of the NHS. The DHSC’s Medical Technology directorate has a strategy to centrally improve patient safety and enable higher quality care through access to and use of medical devices.
Priority 3 of the MedTech strategy is to improve the maturity of enabling infrastructure for medical devices to a level more comparable with other healthcare sectors such as medicines.
The challenge
NHS England’s eProcurement strategy calls for the creation of a national Product Information Management (PIM) system to hold key data about medical devices. PIM systems are already commonplace in other industries like retail where PIM data powers point of sale and inventory management processes.
DHSC ran an internal Discovery to validate who would benefit from a national PIM system. They found that having accurate and accessible product data will help clinicians, procurement officers and patient safety leads discover, evaluate and operationalise medical devices more quickly and efficiently.
DHSC needed to follow their success with an Alpha phase project that could explore options for how a national PIM would work in practice and how one might be built and successfully adopted. Carrying out an Alpha phase before launching into a major project is a Government Digital Service recommendation for avoiding expensive IT mis-delivery and challenging a project’s riskiest assumptions.
What we did
Working with our partners Marvell Consulting, we formed a multi-disciplinary agile team to research, build and test ideas with data consumers and providers in a 12-week Alpha project.
We kicked off with an initial round of user research with data consumers to understand what a PIM database would need to contain and how users would access it. We quickly found that users have a broad set of information needs depending on their role, location and task. We applied our specialist insight in building data infrastructure for Government to iterate the PIM vision to include flexible data collection with collaborative maintenance between consumers and providers.
We also applied our strong technical skills to appraise potential data sources within the healthcare domain. We analysed data from the UK’s medical device regulator, NHS Supply Chain and the World Health Organisation to understand how their data might be reused in a UK PIM. We developed prototype matching of device records between the datasets and assessed the quality and completeness of each dataset of interest, and analysed the governance and licensing processes that each dataset required.
We also developed a proposed technical architecture that would minimise the operational overhead for DHSC whilst ensuring a smooth user experience for data consumers and providers, and understood how users could reuse their sign in credentials from a variety of existing sources using technology such as OpenID Connect (OIDC) or user-friendly low-barrier mechanisms such as passwordless login or magic links.
The result
We successfully delivered an Alpha after twelve weeks, providing a number of high-quality artefacts including a detailed report which set out our learnings and recommendations for a subsequent Beta. Our people, processes and outputs were highly praised by both immediate colleagues and senior civil servants with DHSC.
Our Alpha has helped DHSC de-risk a much longer and more costly Beta phase and provided them with confidence in executing the next phase of their digital delivery for PIM. Our input into their business case will help them secure the long term support that a national database requires and ensure that PIM successfully fulfils its potential to improve patient outcomes in the NHS.
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