Supporting & Empowering Scotlands Citizens: National Action Plan for Technology Enabled Care

Telehealth and telecare would enable choice and control in health, care and wellbeing services for an additional 300,000 people.

Delivered: The full figures to the end of March 2016 will not be published until November 2016, but early indications are that we have exceeded the milestone, with more people than ever before able to access telehealth and telecare across a range of services, supports and options.

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.

On-Going

This remains in progress, with a broad range of activity supporting the objective. Deliverables to date include;

• NHS Education for Scotland ( NES), the Scottish Social Services Council ( SSSC) and the Scottish Centre for Telehealth & Telecare ( SCTT) commissioned an analysis of current staff's access to technology, technology skills and support in using technology across Scotland's health and social services. This identified that technology is generally seen as helpful in providing care and support (80% respondents), particularly in supporting efficient decision-making by staff and service users (76%).
• A patient.co.uk survey of 7,000 people identified that 60% of respondents had an interest in monitoring their chronic condition using a mobile app.
• Our engagement with over 3,500 people as part of the Living it Up Project evidenced that our older population want to be able to use technology to manage their lives better.
• Research carried out by the Department of Health shows that 75% of the UK population goes online for health information, and 50% use the internet for self-diagnosis (see example 1 above).
• It is estimated that around a quarter of all over 75s already use technology (primarily telecare) to support them at home.

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.

Delivered: The Digital Health & Care Institute (the DHI) was successfully launched in October 2013. It now has over 100 projects underway within its development pipeline and informs future care delivery through facilitating our national ecosystem events which debate challenges facing health and care with input from industry, academia and health and care practitioners to explore and develop solutions.

Scotland has an international reputation as a centre for the research, development, prototyping and delivering on innovative telehealth and telecare services and products at scale.

Delivered: We have received multiple requests and have hosted around 50 international delegations from across Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Korea, Australia, America and Canada. Via our delivery partner, the Scottish Centre for Telehealth & Telecare ( SCTT) in NHS 24, we successfully attracted over £5 million inward investment from Europe over the past 3 years. This has been in support of a range of technology enabled care projects, such as United4Health, SmartCare (see example 2) and MasterMind. SCTT received 97 new European business enquiries and collaboration requests in 2015/16 alone. Scotland has formally signed Memorandums of Understanding with other European regions in support of knowledge transfer and international collaboration, and we build on our positive reputation in Europe by engaging with influential stakeholders such as the Chief Scientific Adviser to the President of the European Commission.