NHS Long Term Plan: a welcome step for digitally enabled and better co-ordinated health and social care

The NHS Long Term Plan was announced at the beginning of January 2019. It’s great to see the ambition of the plan and recognition of the pivotal role that technology and digital health services can play in delivering properly joined-up care for patients at the right time.

The plan is a welcome step in recognising the important role that community and primary care play in delivering care in partnership with acutes. This re-phrasing of the strategy will make a big difference in helping services deliver co-ordinated care for citizens.

We also welcome the renewed focus on integration and interoperability to break down some of the current barriers to information sharing in the NHS. We want to see multidisciplinary teams from different primary and community care organisations more able to use information and data to work better together to deliver care services, engaging citizens in the process.

At RIVIAM Digital Care secure NHS integration is at the heart of everything we do. Our software platform delivers into NHS services every day and helps create the infrastructure for innovation to thrive and for pathways to be re-designed. We agree with the report writers that ‘digital services and data interoperability give us the opportunity to free up time and resources to focus on clinical care and staying healthy.’ [See section 5.7, P92]

RIVIAM's response to the NHS Long Term Plan was originally published as part of an industry review by Health Tech newspaper.