Softcat has moved to address new healthcare legislation complexities by merging two teams of specialists, in order to better serve public sector customers in the Integrated Care System (ICS).
Announced in 2019 and launched in July 2022, the Health and Care Act 2022 has resulted in England being divided into 42 ICSs, each with populations ranging between 500,000 and 3,000,000.
ICSs are partnerships that bring together NHS Trusts, local authorities, and other organisations, for a collaborative approach to providing health and care services, to reduce inequalities across geographical areas.
Billy Smith, Integrated Care and Government Sales Manager, said it was important that Softcat looked at how it could adapt to meet these changes so that it continues to deliver excellent customer service. As a result, it merged the Healthcare and Local Government teams; centralising expert intelligence to create the Integrated Care and Government Team (ICG).
This will provide a cohesive range of technologies and consultancy services, to help organisations accomplish true digital transformation. The team will support organisations with dedicated, regionally aligned account managers, who hold a wealth of experience in the health and care sectors.
Billy explained: “Integrated care is not just about the patient experience anymore, it's about the citizen experience. The new ICSs impact local government and NHS trusts, so we’ve looked at what challenges that might bring to create this dedicated team.
“The changes require organisations to work more closely together but that does not just mean IT. However, it is well known that the best, most efficient, and cost-effective ways of achieving some of these broader care goals is by leveraging technology. This is where we come in. Our people genuinely care, and work relentlessly to understand and provide what our customers need. We believe that digital is key to health and care outcomes, and we can build solutions for these good citizen outcomes. The formation of our ICG team is born from this approach, understanding how we must continually evolve to support the health and care sector for years to come.”
The ICG team at Softcat will bring together knowledge, best practise, and intelligence from across all the ICSs in England. This will ensure tech solutions align, providing better value for money and more effective processes for customers.
“ICSs will be looking at how the partner organisations can integrate with each other, collaborate and through digital technologies make activities seamless for the workforce, citizens and patients,” said Phillipa Winter, Account Chief Technologist, who was integral to the teams’ restructure and former CIO at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust.
“How they use the public pound in a more efficient way is only possible by removing the siloed ways of working across the partners, and this new legislation has put ICSs on a statutory footing to do that. However, this change makes it much more complex for our customers and we are here to help them understand and navigate their new strategies and ways of collaborative working. Our focus is on collaboration and listening to customer feedback, which allows us to deliver customer-led technology, draw from the experiences of others within the sector, share best practices and new innovations and emerging technologies and take the bigger picture into account.”
Softcat will be attending HETT Show, a digital health conference, on the 27-28 September at the ExCeL, London. The event provides the digital health community with two days of networking, learning and procuring from the most influential figures across healthcare.
Whether you're yet to start your integrated care journey or if you've already started but you don't know where to go next, the Softcat team will be there to support you.
For more information about how we can help, just get in touch.