Context for the Project

Health and social care have been challenging environments for local innovators trying to develop and pilot useful digital innovations. The problems are mainly two-fold:

1. Local innovators are typically frozen out of procurement processes because they do not usually have the bidding infrastructure and experience for writing successful business cases;
2. Understanding and navigating all of the technical, economic, social and political complexities (with often competing requirements and constraints) of national, local and individual health and care environments represent significant challenges to the successful design and adoption of innovation.

Some of the complexities include the constraints of legacy systems (both digital and analogue) which can be too costly or difficult to replace, a quality regime which continuously reviews and changes care pathways, people who need to be involved are often too busy to tell you what they need and there is conflicting information on governance due to a lack of open standards.

There is a need for comprehensive health and care records but we know that capturing information from these records usually involves multiple  information systems whilst records are often contained within proprietary commercial infrastructure which usually require third parties to pay for access to these records.

Responding to these challenges, a project funded by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Award and supported by open source champions, Apperta Foundation, sought to develop a strategy and toolkit to help local innovators overcome some of the challenges and translate complexity into successful business cases and actionable plans for realising the benefits.