Local digital adult social care projects awarded funding

13 Feb 2020 12:18 PM

This week, NHS Digital announced that sixteen organisations that provide and commission adult social care services are to receive a share of £4.5m to enable them to roll out their local digital projects on a wider scale.  

The organisations have been selected to receive a Social Care Digital Pathfinders grant, which supports products and services that have already been piloted in small local areas - with the view to implementing them on a larger scale. The successful Digital Pathfinders will now commence a 13-month implementation phase with projects predominantly looking at standardising information and developing digital ways of sharing that information between multiple health and care organisations.

South Gloucestershire Council and London Borough of Sutton, for example are both working to recognise care homes as Partners in Care by developing the ‘digital red bag’. This involves providing care homes with access to the existing Local Health and Care Record (LHCR) portals (Connecting Care and Health Information Exchange respectively), which allow information to be shared across GPs, hospitals and other local organisations to support continuity of care. This new initiative will mean that care homes can also view and update those records.

The two projects are also collaborating closely with the aim of developing red bag standards and a blueprint for deployment which could be rolled out nationally.

You can view the full list of funded pathfinders here.

techUK’s Head of Local Public Services, Georgina Maratheftis commented:

“This funding will come some way in supporting interoperability and open standards across the adult social care ecosystem. The pathfinder projects are a great example of collaboration across the place and locality to improve outcomes. It will be great to see outputs and lessons learnt being shared and scaled up.”

Local digital adult social care projects awarded share of £4.5m