Partnership collaboration and innovation

Wayfinder

The Interweave partnership facilitates a collaborative approach across the partners and supports local partner-led innovation, such as the work being undertaken by the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland (LLR) team on the development of patient portal functionality beyond that currently offered through the Interweave Portal.

Wayfinder is the NHS England programme and technology that presents acute hospital information within the NHS App, allowing patients to manage their appointments through Patient Engagement Portals (PEPs).

The Wayfinder programme aims to utilise PEPs to enable easier appointment management for patients. It has developed an integration management layer called the Wayfinder Care Aggregator for linking information from PEPs to the NHS App.

LLR are in favour of this approach but to maximise their return of investment and to utilise Interweave platform capabilities, they are reusing components for theirWayfinder solution.

Specifically, they are reusing existing Interweave components such as the Interweave Patient Identity Exchange (PIX) and the central Interweave Exchange platform to enable the Wayfinder Aggregator to consume real time data directly from LLR Exchange, thereby avoiding restricted point to point integration with University Hospitals Leicester NHS Trust (UHL).

Interweave uses the national NHS Login capability and is readily available to become a patient facing appointment management interface accessible from the NHS App. Reusing Interweave technology will create opportunities for wider use beyond UHL’s elective care and extend beyond simple appointment management functionality to include pre and post assessment information sharing, notifications and alerts, waiting list visibility and the longer term aim of enabling care plan access for patients to view and contribute to, for any Interweave connected organisation.

Interweave plays a key role in surfacing acute hospital information within both the NHS App web and mobile applications, allowing users to interact with that data. As a newly developed application within the Interweave technology suite, it connects to Interweave Exchange, functioning as both a Data Provider and Data Consumer. As a Consumer, it retrieves UHL appointment data from Interweave Exchange. As a Provider, it captures patient responses to cancellation and rescheduling requests and shares them with UHL via Interweave Exchange. Interweave Exchange acts as the integration layer between with UHL, ensuring that appointment information from UHL, already available through the LLR Care Record, is also surfaced through to the NHS app.

LLR are progressing with connecting Interweave directly into NHS App, with the first phase focusing on displaying appointment information from University Hospitals Leicester (UHL) and enabling patients to request appointment cancellation or rebooking, along with providing reasons for these changes.

Because of the partnership working, once the integration with UHL has been achieved the functionality can be rapidly replicated to other Trusts within the Interweave eco-system – initially for the Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust (LPT) within the LLR footprint, but eventually for any other Trust in the Interweave footprint.

This would mean that a patient attending one hospital in the Interweave footprint for a long-term chronic condition, but who also attended another hospital within a neighbouring ICS for some specialist care would only need to use one application to manage their appointments. Not only does this deliver a better experience for the patient, but it reduces cost through avoiding the need for multiple PEPs.

International Patient Summary

As another example of the innovation delivered by Interweave Partnership, when the G7 health ministers made a commitment to the adoption of the International Patient Summary (IPS) at their meeting in the UK in 2021 there was an urgent need to develop a proof of concept (PoC) for a patient mediated record. NHS England were able to commission the Interweave Partnership to quickly develop a proof of concept for a patient mediated IPS.

By reusing components from the Interweave product set and other national components such as NHS Login – and working with their open-source supplier – the partnership were able to very rapidly develop a working PoC.

This PoC was successfully demonstrated to the Joint Initiative Council – the international standards oversight body – along with the Global Digital Health Partnership, who have oversight of the governance of the IPS as a global good. The learning from that PoC has since been built upon by other countries.

AI

A more recent example of innovation is the work on developing a Generative AI Proof of Concept with Deloitte and Google. This project is building a user interface which can summarise patient records and also provide the ability for the user to search through data based on their specific criteria, e.g. condition.

The goal here is to allow the ‘machine’ to do the heavy lifting and to remove unnecessary burden from the clinician or care worker, preventing information overload and making sure the right information gets to the right person at the right time, and as efficiently as possible!

Social Care

The partnership is also a leading work on the development of FHIR profiles to support interaction with Social Care, and has been actively engaged with HL7 (UK). This evidences the Interweave support of the core remit of our ICS partners in the integration of health and social care.

Summary

Being an integral part of the NHS family, and committed to the implementation of open standards gives the partnership the opportunity to rapidly support proposals for new and innovative uses of the Interweave platform. Interweave is supported by Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber and is being actively promoted by their recently appointed Director of Digital Partnerships.