Researchers and doctors getting together

By applying BT technology many critical needs at UK hospitals can be satisfied

Our Centre has formed a research partnership with the Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust to understand their unmet needs and to work with the clinicians there to develop new solutions for all UK hospitals.

New technologies will enable health services of the future to be more efficient, more easily accessible to patients, and able to deliver more effective care. Such improvements are in fact central to the National Program for IT which is being rolled out to all NHS Trusts across the UK. They have stretching targets to meet on performance and care delivery, and our centre’s research partnership with the Ipswich Trust is aimed at creating generic solutions that will help all Trusts to meet their targets.

The modernisation process that all NHS Trusts are facing is huge in scale, cost and impact. As well as improving care delivery the modernisation process is also designed to give patients greater empowerment over the medical treatment they receive, and easier access to the clinicians who administer that treatment. The big challenge is that these improvements must all be made within existing resources. To achieve this NHS Trusts and medical centres must focus on improving operational efficiency, by redesigning systems and processes and developing new ways of delivering the highest level of patient care.

BT’s expertise in ICT technologies and applications can help the NHS understand where and how radical improvements can be made. The challenge is to bring the right technology to bear on the unmet needs. The newly formed partnership with the Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust is aimed at just that. Through a program of seminars jointly hosted by our centre and the Ipswich Trust, representatives from both organisations come together on a regular basis to freely exchange views and ideas. These are captured and assessed for their suitability to be developed as new collaborative research projects.

Several strong candidates have already emerged from the seminar program. They address critical areas within the Trust such as bed occupancy management and other resources, as well as new working practices for clinicians and hospital administrators. They also address ways in which the Trust can extend its care into the local community: instead of the patients needing to travel to the medical centre to receive care, there is a growing requirement on Trusts to place clinicians in the community and deliver care at patient’s home.

Innovations such as these, and the unmet needs that they address, are at the heart of our centre’s partnership with the Ipswich Trust. The outcome for BT will be the prospect of new business opportunities in the health sector, and for the NHS it will be new means to meet performance targets while continuing to deliver the best patient care.