Innovation

Contents

• Delivering Innovation
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Integration and Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Blockchain
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)
• Our Innovation Schemes will focus on
• Transformation Plan headlines
• Measures for success

The future of health and social care is dependent upon digital. Without continual progress on our digital transformation journey, without co-design, support and adoption, our digital strategy will not be successful.

Ultimately, we need innovation to be embedded across all areas of the organisation, a cross-cutting theme that transcends all of our digital strategy themes.

Unfortunately, with the current level of progress with our digital maturity, process improvement and digital upskilling, it means that the ambition for innovation across the organisation is simply not feasible. We are still addressing too many foundational elements throughout this strategy that prevent a sufficient, dedicated focus on the cutting edge.

We want to get to the point where we can build upon our foundational infrastructure. With better performance, reliability, accessibility and knowledge of the unknown we can adopt new digitally enabled care processes that maximise the use of our systems functionality.

We aim to innovate and deploy cutting edge technologies, design new systems, embed new processes and digitally enhance our care opportunities. However, we need to ensure the fundamentals are in place to make substantial progress.

“Digital technology is key to providing an agile service that can respond to service users' needs in a variety of ways, particularly given that we often cater to vulnerable individuals who may not feel safe or comfortable to leave the house and further digital innovation may be able to reach even more individuals than before.”
Ciaran Hill, Assistant Service Manager - AHP & Paediatrics, Targeted Children's Services

Throughout the digital engagement sessions there were particular phrases that nearly always pre-fixed a digital innovation suggestion or opportunity, “it may seem silly but…”, “We need our systems to be reliable, but also it would be really good if…”, “It’s a bit sci-fi but I’ve heard of…”, “Is Artificial Intelligence too optimistic?”.

With 14 other digital strategy themes that had a primary focus on the fundamentals of where we need to be digitally, a dedicated section on innovation seemed the appropriate thing to do.

In a future MPFT strategy update in 5 years’ time, we aim to be in a place where a dedicated digital strategy is no longer required. We aim to have digital interwoven throughout the fabric of the organisation and its partners so seamlessly that it becomes a key element of the Trust’s approach to service delivery and not a strategy in its own right.

Innovation will remain its own theme for as long as we make insufficient progress in our other strategic ambitions and our core systems reliability, functionality and performance.

Digital innovation is waiting for us on the other side of consistency. 

Delivering Innovation

Through our dedicated digital strategy engagement, we have taken time to understand not just the technology needs, but the service user, carer and staff needs equally.

We understand that focussing on only one side of the equation stifles innovation and often results in inadequate outcomes.

Through ongoing engagement, co-design and delivery, we will be adaptive in our thinking. We will anticipate change and approach all enhanced care opportunities and operational process problems with a growth mindset. We will use our awareness of the art of the possible to ensure effective problem-solving. This is how we will make innovation happen and this is a key component of our MPFT Digital People plan approach with the 7 digital principles.

“Sometimes not knowing the art of the possible can be a hindrance to process redesign. We would struggle to find a redesigned process where digital isn't involved.”
Dr. Katy Morris, Head of Continuous Improvement

We know that innovation is a means to increase capacity, to reduce inefficient behaviours and solve ineffective processes.

We will collaborate with service users, carers, staff, managers, Quality Improvement (QI) leads and research colleagues. We will also ensure we evaluate innovative pilot projects, processes and new approaches to digital innovation consistently and rapidly.

Through robust change management and communications processes that encourage collaboration and co-design, we will gain followership, cultural buy-in from service users and staff, we will be responsive to feedback, adapt and continue to innovate.

“How do we get the organisation’s bureaucracy to keep pace and not stifle innovation and transformation?”
Dr. Rachel Lucas, Director of Psychological Services, Trust Recovery Lead

We will ensure any innovation applies the principles of privacy by design. Innovation does not mean increased risk. We will be proactive and not reactive when it comes to preventing unauthorised access to our systems and protecting the privacy of our service users.

These approaches will align Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the NHS Digital Data Security Protection Toolkit (DSPT) principles of privacy and security.

While our local research and evaluation processes and those with our educational partners bring value at pace, we have the potential to scale further and faster through national evaluations such as the NHSx AI Lab.

This national approach and use of NHS Digital Playbooks and Global Digital Exemplar Blueprints ensure we can make the chance to have larger trials, alongside other NHS Trusts concurrently across the country, to reduce risk and increase learning. "We’re excited by digital innovation but want to avoid expensive mistakes"
Anne O'Shea, Shropshire IAPT Operational Manager

As described in the delivering digital transformation section of our strategy, our approach to capturing innovation ideas and using our organisational governance structures will encourage, rather than stifle, rapid developments.

We will work with our local partnerships, our services users and staff to come up with new opportunities. We will achieve this by using platforms such as the MPFT Innovation Hub, the In Our Gift Ideas system locally, and the Staffordshire University Digital Innovation Centre for Health and Social Care through partnerships within Higher Education.

We will also look to our national Academic Health Science Networks and strategic supplier partnerships to broker macro level partnerships across regions and encourage collaboration and pooling of resources around a common theme.

To encourage systemic learning and further innovation across the health and social care and 3rd sector, we will find means to work with our research and innovation colleagues. We will produce local evaluations and our communications team will showcase our innovation achievements to share learning.

Through successful innovation we will improve access to care for our service users, improve health promotion, reduce wasteful practice and release time to deliver more informed, personalised and enhanced care.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

One of our first priority areas of digital innovation is the creation of an online MPFT Wiki knowledgebase and chat bot assistant for our staff.

For MPFT this will be the first of its kind, a centralised up to date knowledgebase that captures team, premises, process, policy and support information. This will also be equipped with an AI chat bot that signposts staff to the appropriate information without the need for human intervention to reduce wait times for everyone.

Staff will spend less time spent logging requests for information and less time waiting for a response from a service desk that can be readily obtained through the knowledgebase.

Our support services will have more time to focus on priority issues with less time required trawling through advice requests on support calls answering the same questions time and time again.

“Trying to search and locate a relevant Policy or SOP on the intranet is a nightmare, we need better access to information as we lose so much time trying to find things that have been moved or aren’t there anymore.”
Mavis Chatterton, AHP Referral Centre Service Lead

On the back of a successful internal AI deployment, in the coming years we will look to streamline our appointment booking and self-referral processes through AI technology.

Dedicated chat bots that are accessible all hours through our websites or bespoke applications, linked to data such as appointment information, can aid our service users that need information and guidance outside of a usual phone call or email approach.

There has also been successful AI supplemented triage of incoming referrals across NHS services.

Through discussions with our 0-19 Family Health and Wellbeing Services and our Musculoskeletal Medicine (MSK) services, there are shared ambitions to improve speed and accuracy of single points of access processing and onward referrals to specialist teams through AI supported means.

Common referral types can be automatically reviewed and referred to the specialist team without the need for human intervention. This is based on algorithms configured on self-referral forms, or through AI analysis of referrals from other health and care services.

AI can also be used to improve the Making Every Contact Count (MECC) ambition, reducing the burden on clinicians to collect this relevant data by profiling this information upfront and sign posting service users against clearer pathways.

These automated approaches will improve the pace of our referral to treatment times for service users and release capacity to provide meaningful, personalised care and support.

Computer Vision AI is an app-based approach that can review images and support our staff with machine assisted decision making. This approach would be particularly useful for remote image support of wound care and healing rates and evaluation of podiatry needs and community nursing assessments to name a few.

These AI approaches have been led nationally through the NHSx AI Lab as an approach to help with the COVID related backlog.

Utilising AI to triage and refer can gain faster response times for service users on waiting lists. This approach must be considered across the Trust’s many access points in the coming years.

Our Quality and Clinical Performance colleagues have also highlighted the need for AI to support reporting and data analysis for risk, audit and clinical quality.

Where there is lots of historical data available, AI can analyse and synthesise this data much more efficiently than our staff members. People often struggle to analyse large data sets and cannot see patterns and make predictions that AI can be programmed to perform.

Through the development of consolidated Business Intelligence (BI) data dashboards that combine data from across all of our systems, equipped with AI, we can lift up the key data decision points for review through automation, enabling faster and more informed decision-making. This is described further in the Data and Information theme.

Currently our team managers and central finance team manually spot check and approve all expense claims. Through similar approaches used to detect credit card fraud in banking, we have the opportunity to introduce AI analytics of mileage claim data and to report where claims fall outside of the expected patterns of behaviour.

This AI driven approach would review data from the scheduling and appointments system, and historical expense claim trend data and flag anomalies on patterns and claim values by exception for staff to review.

Integration and Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Systems integration is not an innovation in isolation, but forms a key element to the Integrated Care Systems theme. However, integration combined with automation can introduce rapid efficiencies.

Several innovation suggestions were made during our digital engagement sessions. One such example included the integration and automation of expense claim reporting as means of automating mileage claims for community team travel. This integration and automation would dramatically reduce the administrative overhead of our community-based workforce and release time to care.

RPA processes will be considered to support integration of data between systems where Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) between interoperable systems are not available. Where at all possible, the integration of systems will be achieved through fully managed and supported APIs.

RPA deployments can also focus on administration intensive, repeatable processes across our business support operations. Without RPA, these processes consume many staff hours of manual data processing. Another example suggested was the use of RPA to process recruitment details for the automatic allocation of systems accounts and provision of systems licencing.

Blockchain

Blockchain is a new secure approach to the distributed, decentralised and immutable, tamper proof, storage of data.

It works in a way which means that every transaction is transparent to those that are secured on the network, and records can only be uploaded and stored by authorised individuals.

Once the data is written and the record is validated, it is locked into the chain and cannot then be changed or deleted.

It has the potential to increase our security, protect our health and care data and make our files completely tamper proof.

We await developments in this space in the next 5 years for a more complete and secure service user record.

Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT means the connection of devices, sensors and systems to transfer data across the internet and internal networks. There are many use cases for IoT within health and care that have already been discussed in some of our service user focussed themes such as wearable fitness devices and medical monitoring devices in our Remote and Care Monitoring theme. Within our Estates and Digital theme we discuss IoT such as smart heating, lighting and ventilation.

The use of IoT for device and asset tracking across all MPFT community areas is a real innovation possibility. It has the potential to improve the asset management and ongoing review and maintenance of all Trust assets.

Through use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), we can monitor our connected devices and track their location for security, preventing loss and un-necessary ongoing investment into replacement of missing assets.

IoT will also increase the volume of data that is collected in real-time which will require storing, processing and analysing. The use of the this data for reporting and improving decision making in health and care is discussed in our Data and Information theme.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)

MPFT has already started looking into Virtual Reality (VR) assisted care through our “PR in VR” Pulmonary Rehabilitation approach within our respiratory services.

We await the full evaluation results of the VR trials with service users in the near future, but the VR exercises for Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) assessments and AI assisted alerting look like a promising approach to digitally enabling care for this condition.

Another example of an existing VR project is the Katharine House Hospice VR project. A 6 week evaluation to aid mental health and wellbeing through VR was undertaken in partnership with Keele University.

From our engagement sessions the forensic inpatients staff highlighted many innovative areas of exploration. This included VR training of staff to support learning of awareness and safety on a forensic inpatient environment. Another example was the VR supported service user recovery approaches such as mindfulness, rehabilitation and gaming for entertainment and physical wellbeing.

There are many more potential use cases to explore and review from national learning, from eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder support to pain management to rehabilitation. The opportunities are there to be explored in the coming years.

Measures for success