Digital Health Rewired 2022

On 15 and 16 March, we attended Digital Health Rewired 2022, which we were supporting once again, this time as joint headline sponsors. The System C & Graphnet Care Alliance had a large stand in a prime position at the entrance of the event, which provided us with a valuable opportunity to greet all sorts of people as they arrived.

It was wonderful to see so many new faces, as well as catching up with customers, friends, and colleagues. Held at the Business Design Centre in Islington, it was the first time in a couple of years that many of us had been able to get together face to face, and there was a definite buzz in the air. It was also the first event for the entire Care Alliance, including recent additions, CareFlow Medicines Management and Docobo, who joined System C and Graphnet on the stand.

There was a lot of interest in the increased capabilities of the Care Alliance, and the interoperability that is possible between the different solutions, with plenty of requests for demos of Docobo’s remote monitoring and virtual wards solutions, and CMM’s medicines management platform. Representatives from both, including Adrian Flowerday, MD of Docobo, were certainly kept busy. HIMSS is a hot topic that came up time and again, and we had a few conversations around how our cloud and mobile-enabled CareFlow EPR can help Trusts achieve HIMSS levels 6 and 7.

Along with meeting people at the stand, we learned a lot from the various talks that were taking place on stages around the exhibition.

Tim Ferris, the director of transformation at NHS England and Improvement, spoke about the differing levels of digital maturity between NHS organisations, capacity challenges, what we have learned from the pandemic and moving forward. He was very clear on the value of electronic patient records and going paperless, saying:

There are really amazing examples of digital excellence but there are also places that have very few systems. I think 19% of acute trusts do not have an EPR. That’s not okay in this day and age and in 2022 it’s not okay to be personally witnessing mistakes being made on paper. The advantages to patients of having electronic systems safeguard for written errors is now so well established.

He went on to explain that one of the biggest challenges facing the NHS is capacity, but that this can be tackled with the introduction of virtual wards.

On day one, System C’s joint CEO, Markus Bolton, spoke on the Rewired Integrated Care stage (which we sponsored) about integrated care and the importance of the ICS model and its value for patients.

Several of our customers also presented, including Dr Heike Veldtman, GP and Sharon Boundy, Associate Director of System Transformation at Frimley Health and Care ICS and Frimley Health FT, who talked about end to end management of virtual hubs, from cohort identification, caseload management, and remote monitoring to support anticipatory care. Also, Dr Paula Bennet, Chief Nurse and CNIO at Health Innovation Manchester, who discussed the GM Care Record and how it is supporting the development of the ICS – and Deborah Wickens, Lead Nurse Harm Free Care at Barking, Havering, and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, who took attendees through her experience of revolutionising tissue viability nursing practice through the use of digital technology.

Graphnet was also delighted to have won Chair’s Choice award at the INTEROPen Hackathon event, which takes place throughout the two days of the show. The focus this year was on interoperability with social care to support falls prevention, facilitated by the sharing of real-time medication and allergy data using FHIR APIs.

As always, Digital Health Rewired was a hugely enjoyable and beneficial event for us. Thank you to Digital Health for organising, and for giving us the opportunity to get involved. We look forward to seeing everyone again in 2023.