We hear a lot about digital transformation, its promise and potential. And we increasingly hear about how it is bringing radical change and better outcomes to the NHS and the wider healthcare and wellness space.
Richard Corbridge is Chief Information Officer for the pharmacy chain Boots, and an eager cheerleader for tech-enabled healthcare. And, he insists that digital transformation is already advanced and embedded.
“The delivery of healthcare now has a reliance on technology—and that is a good thing,” he says. Technology, argues Corbridge, can create “safer, more efficient and more patient-focused healthcare”, but also hand power back to the patient, giving them a sense of agency and control.
Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic has supercharged this digital transformation, encouraging the mass adoption of NHS smartphone apps and remote consultations. It proved that everyday tech could become a healthcare access point, and created a new understanding of how digital tools can supplement or sometimes replace “in-person” care and attention. Accenture’s most recent UK Patient Survey found that there was a five-fold increase in people using virtual consultations with their medical provider and remote patient monitoring compared to the pre-pandemic survey.
“The pandemic taught everyone that digital is an intrinsic part of healthcare now,” Corbridge says. “Every patient became suddenly used to engaging with healthcare in a digital manner—this would possibly have taken another decade to become mainstream, but it is now here to stay, in all the most appropriate places.”
For most of his career, Corbridge has been at the vanguard of digital transformation within health services. He has been CIO for the National Institute for Health Research, and for the Republic of Ireland’s entire healthcare system. He is also part of the faculty of CHIME (College of Healthcare Information Management Executives), providing education and accreditation for digital leaders involved in healthcare.
Now he is leading the digital charge at one of the (most resilient) mainstays of the British high street, and a health and wellbeing front line.
Corbridge joined Boots as Innovation Director in 2018, becoming CIO in 2020, “Ensuring that technology in its widest form is there to support business change and transformation.” It’s a role he has had at four other organizations, but insists that his plans for Boots “are the most ambitious I have ever led”.
Boots was fully enlisted into the pandemic response, and its impact on the business was as radical as it was on the NHS, forcing innovation, experimentation, and a transformation of traditional roles. “We learnt so much during the last two years in how we delivered support to the NHS during the pandemic; being able to stand up testing centers, vaccination centers, putting pharmacists on NHS111. And that gave us a new meaning in the eyes of the NHS, and for the people of the UK and Ireland.”
For Corbridge it confirmed a conviction that the high street chemist can play an even more central role in public health and wellbeing. “For me, our community pharmacists are the lifeblood of the healthcare systems, if given the opportunity to be so. In too many cases, they are shopkeepers first, and exceptional healthcare professionals second. We are on a mission to change this, and ensure that every one of our healthcare professionals, of which community pharmacists make up a high proportion, can be at the front of a healthcare journey.”
Corbridge argues that high street chemists can take a vital load off an over-stretched and under-resourced NHS. “Health systems the world over have access and capacity issues. In the UK, we can fix this by empowering the pharmacist to be the access point, the first point of call and the trusted advisor, regardless of whether you have a long-term condition and need a new perspective, are a new mum in an urgent need of some advice, or a middle-aged man wanting to know how to stay healthy.”
Ashish Goel, Accenture’s managing director, Europe, Health, agrees that an enhanced role for High Street pharmacists could be a “win-win for both patients and care providers”.
Like all good technologists, Corbridge champions the positive potential of data—and he sees it as key to this expanded role for Boots. “Technology, and the delivery of data to our pharmacists so they can deliver insight to patients, will play a huge part in making this happen.”
The pandemic alerted all of us to the value of good data, and perhaps of a civic duty to become a data point when it serves the common good. It has certainly softened or complicated some of the concerns about health records and privacy. “The pandemic did change that mindset,” Corbridge says. “We understood that to achieve something we want as a wider population, we may need to share information. The NHS app changed people’s minds about how data can be captured, validated and used, and healthcare information formed part of a new transaction.”
He admits that the arguments about how and where patient records and information are used and shared remain complex and fraught, but says a conversation has been started. “I think there is a new openness to what can be done with data,” he says. “We have started a journey that will be of benefit, eventually.”
Goel argues that how that conversation progresses, and transparency around the use of data, is vital to the ongoing transformation of health services. “With the investment that has been pledged to digitize medical records, the question of consent to share health data will become increasingly important,” he says. “This flow of data could be critical to wider changes in healthcare, but Accenture’s research suggests that any changes should involve people themselves. This should be seen as an opportunity to engage people more fully in managing their healthcare, and to collaborate with users in designing new services.”
Ultimately, Corbridge argues, collecting and using data requires consent and transparency. And it requires clarity about that transaction. “The easiest way to get consent is to ask for consent,” he says. “If we, as digital professionals, can help our businesses offer as simple a solution as possible to customers, we can solve this problem. We believe that patients are happy to share information where it benefits the delivery of their healthcare.”
As Corbridge points out, it’s what you do with that data that counts, and will encourage a better understanding in the public of how they can leverage their data to get better service and care. “Monitoring is great, but it’s the insight and action required from the data that matters. With consent and the appropriate checks and measures, we can be an organization that offers personalized healthcare to every patient that wants it, rich content, advice and guidance, solutions to problems, and sign-posting to where care can be delivered.”
It’s clear then, that the impact of technology on health care provision and public health more broadly has been profound, if uneven. The pandemic has stress-tested and accelerated that digital transformation and the sense of emergency encouraged new innovation.
“We have seen three key trends,” says Goel. “First, new technologies such as remote monitoring and virtual wards have helped manage demand, improve efficiency and free up hospital space. Second, more has been done to engage patients directly through channels like the NHS App. Finally, new relationships have formed across public health, connecting islands of information to provide a more effective and coordinated response to people’s needs.”
The next phase of the healthcare’s digital revolution will be built on data and devices, with a shift towards constant health-monitoring, better early-warning systems, and a focus on prevention rather than cure.
“Connected devices could increasingly augment physical infrastructure to meet the demand for healthcare outside of traditional care environments,” says Goel. “Advances in patient engagement could open the door to increased personalization in both treatment and prevention. And greater data interoperability and connectivity could help improve healthcare operations and the health supply chain, enabling greater efficiency and effectiveness.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
