The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) is aiming to develop an interoperability architecture for sharing social care data, along with streamlining data collections and building tools to support the effort, a leading official has said.
Alice Ainsworth, deputy director of social care technology policy at DHSC, outlined the work as part of the Digitising Social Care Programme at last week’s Integrating Digital Health and Care conference staged by UKAuthority.
The department now has a revised target for 80% of social care providers in England to be using digital care records by March of next year.
On the scaling up of the use of the records, Ainsworth said DHSC has already published a roadmap of standards and capabilities for suppliers and developed a minimum operation data standard and reporting minimum data specification, along with the provision of funding to providers to support adoption.
It is now heading towards the development of an interoperability architecture to enable data sharing at scale, bringing together data from providers, local authorities and the NHS, and streamlining and automating data collections. These should provide foundations for building tools such as AI systems for decision support.
Driving adoption
“We said in our policy publication Putting People at the Heart of Care that we’re going to drive the adoption of digital social care records to enable information sharing,” Ainsworth said.
This is accompanied by efforts to evaluate and scale technologies and build a business case for investing in those that can improve the quality of care. So far this has included £7 million of funding for eight projects to develop an evidence base and supporting a number of local government projects form the £42.6 million Accelerating Reform Fund.
There is now an emphasis on the publication of toolkits on the use of various types of technology – the first being for the prevention of falls – and the co-production of guidance on what good evidence looks like.
“We want to do the really robust evidence generation that we’re looking for, so we can say ‘These technologies work, these are the kinds of things that need to be in place for us to take the best advantage of these technologies, so we can make the case for investment',” Ainsworth said.
In addition, there are initiatives to boost the digital skills of care providers, including the development of a self-assessment tool, the launch of a Level 5 qualification in digital leadership and building an understanding of the more specialist skills needed.
The full presentation taken from UKAuthority's Integrating Digital Health & Care 2024 can be found below. Catch up with the all the speaker presentations, on-demand videos and links to other useful resources here
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