e-Personalisation and the VCS
Eleanor Burt (a member of the ICT Foresight panel) recently raised the issue of e-personalisation:
There is an interesting discussion to be had on how ICTs are contributing to ‘personalisation’ against the backcloth of the Government’s growing enthusiasm for the voluntary sector and its proposals for the modernisation of public services.
Personalisation is a major theme for the Government but what does e-enabled personalisation mean in the voluntary sector and what issues does it raise?
Stuart and Lee at Headshift have written an interesting article on personalisation in the health service, in relation to a new Department of Health white paper Our Health, Our Care, Our Say: a New Direction for Community Services, which, as they explain, “calls for a shift in the way services are delivered towards more personalised and community-based approaches”.
Technology has huge potential to act as an enabler for patient choice and community-based services. E-Health Insider points to the obvious technology reference in the white paper, an online self-assessment “Life Check” that can be sent electronically to GPs and accessed via Healthspace. There are also plans for a large-scale demonstration project on how technology can reduce hospital admissions, and a joint health and social care electronic record in the white paper.
But just as the move away from in-patient care paradoxically coincides with our biggest ever hospital building programme, so the move towards technology-assisted community support comes in the middle of the biggest ever civilian IT project, the hugely ambitious Connecting for Health project, which is very much driven by a top-down approach. Estimated to cost in the region of UKP6bn, it is by virtue of its size, cost and scope a fairly centralised process, and arguably a long way from the needs of community-based primary care. If it succeeds, CfH will deliver the kind of underlying infrastructure and pipework that would not otherwise exist, such as electronic patient records, a national data ’spine’, shared data standards and a range of clinician tools. But if we are to involve patients and other stakeholders then there is a real need for simple, usable technologies for community-based interaction around healthcare, whether in support of choice, better information, prevention, planning, commissioning or self-care.