England’s NHS has taken a step towards the development of a new information sharing platform for health and social care.
It is aiming to extend the capabilities of the existing FutureNHS platform, aiming to support collaboration between organisations and teams across the care sector.
NHS England and NHS Improvement have published a procurement notice declaring the intent and looking for support in a discovery phase to kick off early next year.
While describing FutureNHS as successful, it says there are still problems with knowledge sharing and spread, and that users in health and social care need to be able to connect and share information more effectively across organisational boundaries and silos.
Among the barriers identified are the variety of IT and digital infrastructures currently in place and the divergence of transformation solutions in the sector.
The notice says the two organisations have already identified likely users of the new platform, defined some of the challenges and captured ideas and requirements for an improved service.
Connecting people
“A digital solution which supports online sharing, learning and connecting people across the whole of the health and social care system is vital,” it says.
“An online platform that continues to enable and sustain the growth of transformation and innovation for better health and social care outcomes is key to support the health and social care community to drive forward these improvements and developments.”
FutureNHS is currently run by the strategy and development team in NHS England’s data, analysis and intelligence service.
Image by Mike Lawrence, CC BY 2.0 through flickr
