This article was first published on healthandcare.scot

By Eleanor Charsley

The leading trade body for the UK HealthTech sector says Scotland can benefit from innovation, some of it already being exported from Scotland to other countries, to support patients, people being cared for and their carers here.

Speaking at the recent Scottish Policy conference Next steps for the health and social care workforce in Scotland, Director of Government Affairs for the Association of the British HealthTech Industry (ABHI), Eleanor Charsley suggested health and social care in Scotland could soon benefit from the same sorts of transitions as have been seen in banking, air travel and transport.

“Everything we have heard at today’s conference makes it clear that health and care teams are seeking to do their very best for the people they’re looking after under considerable pressure, and that it’s essential that we nurture and support these workforces.

The HealthTech sector brings a huge breadth of different technologies to health and care – be it traditional medical devices such as pacemakers or orthopaedic joints, right the way through to artificial intelligence, digitally enhanced robots, and every sort of diagnostic test.

Our sector also provides the digital platforms and data systems – the digital enabled solutions – that we believe are, and will be, part of the solution. 

I am by no means saying that this is the panacea that will solve all the challenges facing Scotland’s health and care workforces, but there are definitely elements where digital can help to relieve some of the burden – not least the administrative pressures – to free up staff to focus on patient care.

If you look at retail, banking, the airline industry and transport, these are sectors that have really embraced and taken forward digital solutions, with a corresponding huge impact on the way customers and consumers interact with these providers. 

The last flight you took, for instance – how often did you actually need to have a conversation with a human going through that flight booking process?

Of course, in the healthcare sector, there are differences. We're talking about higher risk processes and higher sensitivities in the data – not everything done in other sectors can be transferred across. 

However, we believe digital technologies, when used along the patient pathway, potentially have the ability to reduce administrative burden by enabling patients – citizens – to self-serve, self-monitor and provide the information for clinicians and carers to allow them to monitor, triage and deliver targeted interventions.

We are already seeing an increasing level of patient involvement in their own care and their ability, for instance simply through wearing smart sensors, to collect information that they can share with a clinician to inform decisions.

However, just as in banking where there is an impact when the last bank closes its branch in a community, there is a concern about digital exclusion, of creating inequalities based on people’s access to these technologies. We need to be conscious of not exacerbating this issue, but making technology part of the solution for everyone. 

The problem of workload is not unique to Scotland, but Scotland might be uniquely placed to benefit because of its integrated health and care system, the innovation we’ve already seen demonstrated as teams find ways to serve remote and rural communities, and the ambitions of the Scottish government’s digital health and care strategy.

Across Scotland there are initiatives we can definitely learn from individual regional Data Safe Havens and eDRIS to support the sharing of data for research and innovation.

ABHI can also act as an intermediary, bringing a wealth of experience to Scotland's health and care system from our work with international health systems, and supporting companies to export their innovations globally.

Much of the challenges we are experiencing in Scotland are being seen elsewhere – we increasingly know which digitally enabled systems work in the real world, and where the pitfalls are that we need to avoid. 

And that's where our industry, I think, can play a real role in this partnership: bringing some of that expertise, whether it’s home grown in Scotland or used internationally, into Scotland’s health and care services to ease the workload pressures, to make each patient’s pathway smoother, and to make caring a little easier. 

Although we cannot offer a panacea, we can be an important part of the solution.”