Strategy Finalist 2022: Atos with NHS England

Strategy

Atos helps the NHS to pioneer the digitally-advanced hospitals of the future

Wider use of digital technologies is critical to the future of healthcare: with increasing demand and inevitably limited resources, digital technologies, tools, data and intelligence are essential for better integrated, more effective and efficient health and social care provision.

The New Hospital Programme offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform NHS efficiency, the quality of services and patient outcomes through digital transformation. This is the UK’s biggest and boldest hospital building programme in a generation, comprising a rolling programme of investment in 40 digitally-advanced, integrated hospital and care systems across England between 2020-2030.

A strategic breakthrough for the NHS

Working with NHSE, NHS stakeholders and private sector partners, Atos Consulting enabled the design and delivery of a Blueprint for digitally-advanced hospitals, moving digital to the heart of the New Hospital Programme. Sharing cutting-edge knowledge from this innovative Blueprint will ensure that future New Hospital Programme sites can benefit from good practice and lessons learned, rather than repeat the mistakes of the past. Hospitals would have been designed and commissioned without capitalising on the digital revolution underway across all other industries. Instead, it has pioneered the healthcare of the future incorporating far greater use of digital technologies as critical enablers.

Joined-up strategic thinking

With delivery of the first tranche of new hospitals now underway, the Blueprint has already been used by some sites as a practical, robust and flexible tool for planning and delivering digitally-advanced hospitals across England. NHS Trusts and central policy-makers can mould and manipulate the Blueprint’s components in multiple combinations. This has transformed the way digital is evaluated, integrated and designed as a critical part of hospital planning. The Blueprint has created an important vehicle to bring architects, planners, clinicians, accountants and executives into the same room so that clinical, patient and financial objectives are aligned. This has enabled truly joined-up, richer strategic thinking (at every level) for more efficient, exponential delivery of a wider range of benefits – from better patient and staff experiences, to construction cost savings and net-zero carbon.

Enabling broader transformation

The capability framework developed as part of the Blueprint has been adopted by a number of senior NHS policymakers and will continue to shape thinking around designing the key digital components of new hospitals as part of an integrated healthcare system. Capturing and sharing the early learning would not have been possible without Atos Consulting’s work with NHSE and key stakeholders. The team combined expansive digital knowledge and expertise, with an innate understanding of the NHS landscape. Work to create the Blueprint has clearly and significantly reframed digital transformation strategy for NHS hospitals and their care system partners, laying the foundation for realising the benefits of digital technologies for people’s health in the decades to come.

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