You had your say on the role of technology in integrating care – the results

During our online event with The King’s Fund on integrating care: how to develop evidence-based solutions to improve patient journeys, we asked you, the audience, your opinions. Now we have the results!

The main focus of the poll questions was to find out how important you thought technology was in health and social care, while also discussing barriers to integrating care and the sustainability of changes made during the COVID-19 crisis.

Question 1: To what extent do you think technology can be part of the solution to the problems being discussed? (Part 1)

The problems being discussed were:

• Community capacity for services during COVID-19
• A shift to a more modern culture through technology
• Communication of front-line workers’ feedback
• Quality of data
• Deriving insights from data
• Variation between regions for care

It’s interesting to see that the main two words mentioned were ‘essential’ and ‘significantly’ to technology being a solution to these problems. 60% of you said that technology has a significant part to play, 35% said that it had a partly significant part to play, and only 5% said that it was not significant.

Question 2: What are the barriers to integration?

The government, NHS and Care are in their own silos and could work closer together to release their full potential. However, integrating care can meet barriers which was discussed in the online event. We asked you what you thought the barriers were:

• 50% of you mentioned barriers relating to culture, which took the vast majority
• 14% pointed out communication being an issue
• 14% specified budgets
• 10% of respondents pinpointed IT barriers
• 9% thought priorities played a major role
• 3% mentioned data issues

The main words pulled out of the answers were ‘culture’, ‘trust’, ‘funding’ and ‘silos’.

Question 3: Do you think the changes to patient pathways made through the COVID-19 crisis are sustainable in the longer term?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, health and care were required to rapidly adjust to the changing environment by monitoring the cases in their locations, resource in each location if staff were absent or shielding, and working remotely.

We asked you if you thought these adjustments were sustainable in the longer term. 59% of you weren’t too sure and said maybe, as there were several factors the sustainability depended on such as funding and culture. 32% responded with yes, and only 9% thought that the changes were not sustainable.

Question 4: To what extent do you think technology can be part of the solution to the problems being discussed? (Part 2)

Towards the end of the online event, we asked our first question again; to what extent do you think technology can be part of the solution to the problems being discussed?

It’s interesting to compare the results of the first time the question was asked at the start of the discussion, to the second time at the end. Both times, 60% said that technology played a significant part. What did change though was the partly and non-significant responses. The second time the question was put forward, nobody said that technology was not significant, however when first asked, 5% thought it wasn’t. In both instances, this is a small percentage of the audience, so it’s fascinating to see just how much of an impact you think that technology could play in the new world of health and social care.

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