A National Telehealth and Telecare Delivery Plan for Scotland to 2016: Driving Improvement, Integration and Innovation

4.0 Towards 2020

This national delivery plan focuses on the period up to 2015; however, it has been set within our longer-term ambitions to 2020. This aligns with timescales established within complementary programmes within Scotland and Europe.

Our Triple Win by 2020, from delivering the use of telehealth and telecare at scale in Scotland, will be:

• Enhanced wellbeing and quality of life.
• Improved sustainability of care.
• Increased economic growth in Scotland.

As a milestone towards 2020 our ambitions for March 2015 are that:

• Telehealth and telecare will enable choice and control in health, care and wellbeing services for an additional 300,000 people.
• People who use our health and care services, and the staff working within them, will proactively demand the use of telehealth and telecare as positive options.
• There is a flourishing Innovation Centre where an interacting community of academics, care professionals, service providers and industry innovate to meet future challenges and provide benefits for Scotland's health, wellbeing and wealth.
• Scotland has an international reputation as a centre for the research, development, prototyping and delivering of innovative telehealth and telecare services and products at scale.

Principles

To achieve this we will:

• Support individuals, users and patients to actively participate in the management and delivery of their own health and care;
• Facilitate flexible solutions that support the management of disease and wellbeing and also provide information, products and services which expand choice, control, coverage and accessibility through a range of familiar channels, e.g. Digital TV, phones, web;
• Build on existing and increasingly familiar technologies and favour the adoption of simple, low-cost approaches which can be tailored to the individual, utilising users, own technologies where and when practical to do so;
• Support service redesign to integrate new ways of working into mainstream service provision and pathways; and
• Work across all sectors of Government to drive efficiency and realise best value. By using innovative procurement methods we will build collaborative relationships with our technology suppliers to benefit our citizens and maintain Scotland's position as a leader in this field.

This Delivery Plan sets out six workstreams, each with specific actions to be delivered by 2015. We know that we require long-term, sustainable progress to fully embed telehealth and telecare within an integrated system. Therefore we will review and refresh this Delivery Plan and related actions with the next Scottish Spending Review to take us forward towards 2020.

Workstream One - Improve and integrate health and social care by:

• Helping people with long-term conditions to live independently at home by supporting them to manage their own health and care;
• Embedding telehealth and telecare within whole system pathway redesign to enable people to move smoothly through transitions between services;
• Using telehealth and telecare within preventative approaches;
• Ensuring appropriate synergies with the technical architecture of the eHealth Strategy, including standards, principles and access to enabling technologies.

Workstream Two - Enhance wellbeing by:

• Expanding innovative service models for community-based support and wellbeing;
• Supporting people to be active participants in the design and delivery of their technology-enabled services.

Workstream Three - Empower people by:

• Raising awareness, evidencing and sharing benefits for individuals and carers;
• Recognise the crucial role provided by unpaid carers and develop solutions to meet their needs and wellbeing.

Workstream Four - Improve sustainability and value by:

• Establishing a baseline, and developing consistent outcome measures and indicators to track impact of telehealth and telecare on working practices, productivity and resource use;
• Realising greater efficiencies in procurement, contact centre/responder services, and specialist advisory resources through 'at scale' deployment.

Workstream Five - Support economic growth by:

• Strengthening partnerships between users, practitioners, service providers, industry and academia to meet the needs and aspirations of our citizens and help grow the economy through targeted innovation and development.

Workstream Six - Exchange learning, develop and embed good practice by:

• Recognising and meeting the needs of health, housing, social care, independent and third sector providers for new skills, education and training;
• Supporting leadership capacity and capability;
• Raising awareness, publishing and promoting innovative approaches, good practice and illustrative user/patient experiences.

Supporting and measuring improvement

We will ask the Scottish Centre for Telehealth and Telecare, working in collaboration with the Joint Improvement Team to continue to engage with all key stakeholders and to provide improvement support and challenge in delivering the actions in the National Delivery Plan.

We will ask the National Telehealth and Telecare Advisory Board to review and report on an annual basis the progress made by NHS Boards, Local Authorities and other partners in progressing the Delivery Plan actions.

To increase the pace of improvement and to drive and track progress we will work with NHS Boards, Local Authorities and other key stakeholders to develop quality outcome indicators for telehealth and telecare. These will align with Single Outcome Agreements, support our Quality Measurement Framework and contribute to the suite of outcome indicators for the integration of adult health and social care.