Welcome to the Clinical Digital Manifesto

Problem Statement

Clinicians across the NHS are faced with time-consuming digital workflows that often lead to frustration and wasted time. We believe that poor software, sloppy design, inadequate implementation, insufficient optimisation and uninspired training and support are all contributing to a sub-par experience for our staff and patients. So much so, that it exerts a noticeable 'drag' on our clinical work, disengages our workforce, and also hampers our ability to deliver care sustainably across NHS services.

Why We Believe This

The experience of clinicians who have worked in pre-digital and digital ages of healthcare delivery is that while some things have improved (eg. the ready availability of digital X-ray images), it now simply takes longer to action any given clinical task than it did with a paper form and a pen. It is irritating. The management decisions might be made within minutes of meeting the patient, but putting these into action can quickly explode into half an hour of wrestling with myriad EPRs, ‘portals’, PDFs, printed matter, and phone calls. There is no ancillary staff to assist with this workload so we waste the time of some of our most scarce members of staff doing tedious repetitive admin.

Why We Are Confident We Can Change This

We know from other areas of government such as Government Digital Services, that a different way of approaching digital can change this story. By keeping things simple, focusing on people's needs, solving whole problems and working with modern coding, deployment and computing approaches - it is realistic to dramatically improve people's digital experiences, improve productivity and performance, reduce wasteful spending, and support a better quality of service to meet citizen's raised expectations.

Vision

To bring about a new paradigm for digital in the NHS, so that members of the clinical team are no longer faced with frustrating, time-consuming digital care processes - but are instead truly enabled to care effectively for people across professions, teams and pathways. We want to bring about a future where digital tools are changed and improved faster, giving healthcare teams more power to care effectively and efficiently, and loosen the hold that a small number of large suppliers has on our care system to do so.