The Digital Health Partnership Award helps NHS organisations in England obtain funding to accelerate the adoption of digital health technologies that support patients with long term conditions. Adoption of digital solutions in the NHS is steadily increasing, but these awards speed up that adoption and prove that collaboration with external suppliers can work well for the NHS now and in the future.

The projects that have won the second phase of the awards support a wide array of patients from young people with asthma to people living with Parkinson’s.

Remote monitoring

Many of the award-winning projects support people with chronic conditions at home to transform outpatient care into something that can truly cater to the individual needs of each patient. Tailored care and personalised prescribing are improving patient outcomes by ensuring that people receive the correct care for their unique physiology and needs, as opposed to working to the assumption that everyone’s experience of a condition is the same.

New wearables have been approved to help patients manage Parkinson’s at home. This tech will support clinical decision making based on the current severity of symptoms; round the clock monitoring will enable clinicians to spot signs that medicines or dosages may need changing or identify the need for other interventions – such as physiotherapy – that can stop the condition from worsening.

One of the other winning projects will implement automated technology to identify seizures through the recognition of subtle visual cues such as limb movements, repetitive movements, and facial changes. It is hoped that this will aid in the diagnosis and classification of epilepsy as well as prevent hospital admissions for existing patients. The system will also ‘provide a better experience for those with learning disabilities or those whose native language is not English, which can reduce the anxiety of the whole process.’

Children and young people

In 2020, over half of the UK’s children were reported to have their own smartphones by the age of seven. Despite this high ownership rate and many adolescents showing a willingness to carry a connected device that shares personal data, the commissioning of mobile platform solutions in this age group is still a rarity.

One of the new Digital Health Partnership Award projects has managed to jump this hurdle and aims to use technology to reduce avoidable hospital admissions for children and young people with asthma. Supporting those who are at high risk of further asthma attacks and who live in the most impoverished parts of the region, this project aims to show how valuable digital solutions for children and adolescents can be.

A remote paediatric cardiac monitoring project led by Alder Hey Children’s Hospital Foundation Trust aims to shift existing post-op pathways towards a proactive and preventative model of care. This project, titled Little Hearts at Home, aims to increase early interventions and reduce emergency admissions so that babies can be out of the hospital environment and back home with their families.

The final project aimed at young people focuses on the implementation of a secure video sharing platform – vCreate Neuro – to support young people with epilepsy. Diagnosing epilepsy can be incredibly complex due to a heavy reliance on accurate reports of intermittent symptoms, which ‘is one of the reasons that misdiagnosis rates in epilepsy are so high, varying between 25-50%.’ vCreate Neuro makes diagnosis and symptom management easier by allowing registered patients or their carers to securely share videos and associated metadata with their clinical team.

Avoiding unnecessary hospital trips

Keeping patients out of hospital wherever possible is an obvious part of reducing the current strain on the NHS. Companies such as WoundMatrix enable patients to manage their own wound care at home, thus avoiding unnecessary journeys to the hospital. If patients are concerned about their healing or need any advice, WoundMatrix gives them the option to share photos with clinicians without actually needing to present in person.

Some technologies can facilitate diagnoses without patients ever having to set foot in a hospital at all. AI is being used to diagnose skin cancer with increasing frequency, with some technologies performing diagnoses with the same accuracy as experienced dermatologists. Technology created by SkinVision will be used in 2-week wait triaging, surgery waitlists and follow-up care to streamline dermatology care pathways. This will free up dermatologists to spend more time on complex cases and lead to faster diagnoses across the trust.

There are also projects that strive to improve public health before hospital care is needed. These preventative projects include digital exercise and self-care apps such as EXi, an evidence-based app ‘which analyses user health and fitness and prescribes a personalised physical activity programme.’ Barts Health NHS Trust is embedding EXi as a core part of their physical-activity care pathway to provide short, medium and long term health improvements to their patients. 

When remote technologies began to blossom during the pandemic, many of us wondered whether they would continue to be a focus when the world returned to a semblance of normality. It is good to see that not only are existing solutions remaining in place, but the NHS is further embracing new digital solutions that will make care more accessible and efficient across the nation.

All of these award-winning solutions will help ease current strains on the NHS by reducing in-person attendance and treating patients in the comfort of their own homes.