The journey of transforming patient health has started

Article

Integrated care systems (ICS) are among the most widely discussed topics in healthcare at the moment, but what is really like creating one?

Dr Nina Pearson, the Chair of Luton CCG and the GP Lead for Bedfordshire, Luton & Milton Keynes ICS; and Mark England, the Chief of Staff at Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes (BLMK) Health and Care Partnership spoke this week at the Cambridge Health Network event Supporting Communities on the road to Integrated Care Systems.

According to Dr Pearson, the system’s move to Accountable Care has meant that the journey of truly transforming patient health has started. She is a practising GP sitting on the board of the ICS and stressed the importance of engaging clinicians at all levels and that patients should be kept at the centre of decision making.

Also on the panel were David Sharp and Dr Martin McShane from Optum, a health services and innovation company that has worked with ICS extensively in the US and are working with BLMK. According to Sharp, the NHS has arguably the best healthcare dataset in the world; yet it is currently being underutilised. They argued that data can be mobilised and used to better safeguard the health of patients; predict health trends in the next coming years so that the health system is well-prepared for any occurrence; and to better enable technology to make the system more effective.

Mark England of BLMK has developed the ICS, and stressed the importance of making the money work in the healthcare system by making sure that healthcare providers are properly rewarded. His approach to modelling future needs and costs is based on sophisticated and detailed datasets.

The event was held at Berwin Leighton Paisner and was sponsored by Optum.

The next CHN event is taking place on 19 April with Baroness Dido Harding, the chair of NHS Improvement. She will be addressing the CHN on her experience as a woman running a FTSE 250 company, and on how this has helped to shape her decision making today as the Chair of NHS Improvement. The event is called Are regulators such as NHS Improvement really helping, or are they hindering the progress of the NHS?

Register your interest for a ticket.