The mHealthHabitat team are really pleased to be participating in an #nhssm Twitter chat on Wednesday 17 September 8-9pm. #nhssm meet weekly on Twitter to discuss the use of social media in the UK’s National Health Service. This week their theme is the use of digital tools in healthcare and we have been invited to help run the session along with the fantastic Project Ginsberg.
So this blog post provides a bit of background about who we are, where our programme comes from, and what we are trying to achieve in Leeds. Here goes…
How it all came about
Our programme was borne out of a small workshop in early 2013 where participants were invited to consider how apps could play a role in enabling people with long term conditions to take more control of their health and wellbeing. At the same time, a successful bid to local health commissioners meant that we also had some resources to test out digital tools in mental health. We put the two initiatives together and our mHealth programme came in to being.
The programme began in January 2014 supporting two NHS Trusts, namely Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust (LCH) and Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (LYPFT). A small team has gradually been recruited through a variety of short-term funding sources. The programme is overseen by a steering group which is led by North Leeds Clinical Commissioning Group and reports internally within each organisation.
Our approach
We chose the name mHealthHabitat to reflect the way in which we are endeavouring to create an ecosystem in our city where mobile health can flourish. We are approaching this in three ways:
Tactical –‘learning through doing’ which involves collaborating with services who are keen to engage in digital innovation – supporting them from initial idea through to deployment. This includes everything from carefully identifying problems that services want to solve, through to contracting with suppliers and advising on issues such as intellectual property and integration. The team provide project management support to each initiative.
Habitat – creating an environment in the city for mHealth to flourish with opportunities for the design and developer communities to connect and collaborate with people accessing services, clinicians and academics. The habitat includes regular free ‘show and tell’ evening events; discovery days based on ‘hack’ principles; workshops and talks; horizon scanning; brokering collaborations between different sectors both locally and beyond; and development of a systematic approach to mHealth innovation through a digital innovation pathway.
Strategic – embedding mHealth within transformation projects and the strategic direction of LCH and LYPFT, collaborating with city-wide initiatives such as Smart Cities, as well as influencing national policy and strategy where we can.
Citizen involvement – our digital innovation pathway employs user-centred design and co-production approaches so that people who will benefit from mHealth innovations are fully involved from the outset. We have established regular heart of the habitat breakfast workshops where people accessing services and citizens meet up over breakfast to steer the direction of the programme. We use our blog and Twitter account@mHealthHabitat to share learning as well as create transparency and accountability. We are currently thinking about we can strengthen this much more and would very much welcome suggestions and ideas.
In this highly emergent field, we hope that our approach ensures that we learn once and they can apply that learning in many different contexts. Working across two NHS Trusts enables us to spread the benefits more widely across services for the benefit of the citizens of Leeds.
Key principles
A series of key principles were set out in the original proposal to underpin the mHealth Habitat programme. They are:
Individual care – our programme aims to support person-centred integrated care as conceptualised in the House of Care where individual goals are at the centre. We believe that mHealth can be an enabler for people to take control of their own health and stay well.
Participation – our programme has co-design and co-productive approaches at its core, collaborating with patients and citizens at every step to ensure mHealth innovations meet their needs and aspirations. We are continually thinking and learning about how to do this better.
Organisational – our programme aims to have an enabling approach – keeping things simple, avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy, minimising duplication and taking a balanced approach to risk. We endeavour to enable sharing of resources across organisations and achieve economies of scale through collaboration.
Where we are now
The mHealth Habitat team is currently working with approximately twenty services and the number increases each week – getting the balance right between seizing opportunities and keeping it manageable is a constant challenge.
We are finding a real appetite from clinical services to integrate digital into service transformation, based on an awareness that the expectations and digital literacy of people accessing services is changing all the time. We are working closely with corporate functions to remove barriers and enable even the most simple of innovations, such as e-clinics using Skype type tools, to be realised.
Innovations range from the development of bespoke SMS system which enables an Assertive Outreach Team to maintain light-touch relationships with people accessing the service, through to a two year user-led ‘digital innovation lab’ for young people experiencing mental health difficulties (starting in January). Our most developed innovation is an app prototype which enables people accessing the Yorkshire Centre for Eating Disorders to set goals and share food tracking with their clinician.
We are currently planning our fourth ‘Discovery Day’ which will bring a range of LCH clinical services together with designers, developers and academics to prototype digital artefacts. Using hack and service design approaches, the day aims to accelerate innovative ideas and help participants address wicked problems.
So what’s next
We are still in the very formative stages of our programme and on a massively steep learning curve. In addition to paying attention to the sustainability of the programme over time, we are impatient to get to deployment and evaluation stages with our projects. But as we are learning, things usually take longer than we anticipate, and going at the right pace for all the parties can be a tricky balance.
We’d very much appreciate feedback on our programme and we use every opportunity, such as the #nhssm chat, as a means of learning and developing.
Thank you for reading and I hope you can join the chat.
Victoria