The national ‘MyCare’ app for health and social care is set to launch next month following successful initial release of the platform in the Lanarkshire region.
The Scottish Government-sponsored programme, which went live in the health board area in December, starting with dermatology services, is on track for release in April with the exception of appointments and communications.
Jonathan Cameron, deputy director of digital health and care at the Scottish Government, said yesterday at Futurescot’s Health & Social Care Transformation conference in Glasgow: “So we are ready to launch next month and I’m really excited to confirm that.
‘The part that won’t be there from day one, though, is just around appointments and communications, [but] everything else is there.”
In terms of what people will be able to see via the MyCare app, Cameron confirmed that people will be able to sign into the platform using the government’s secure identity service, ScotAccount, and that they will be view their personal information including their Community Health Index (CHI) number, as well as their vaccinations, medicines and allergies records.
People will also be able to use MyCare as a ‘service finder’, with links to useful information. In time, they will be able to receive digital communications via a ‘Digital Mailbox’, which has the potential to save millions of pounds a year on printed letters and mailings, and notifications of upcoming appointments. Cameron confirmed the service will not be using SMS text messaging functionality.
At the conference, both Cameron and Christine McLaughlin, the deputy chief executive officer for the NHS in Scotland, confirmed they had both been using the app as part of internal trials, and that it was working well.
He added: “And it’s just helpful to have that information to hand, particularly for prescriptions and the service finder’s really improving the links to what’s available on NHS Inform and NHS 24.”
Digital Mailbox will be available later this year, amd health boards are already gearing up to work with secondary care and acute care to start that integration, Cameron added. “So it’s a small step, but it’s a really important step,” he said.
Cameron thanked delivery partners Netcompany, who are overseeing the development of the mailbox system, and CGI, the event’s headline sponsor, for their technical oversight of the app itself.
Cameron said the delivery team, which sits within NHS National Education for Scotland (NES), has been inundated with requests from across all parts of the NHS and social care, to add various services.
He was keen to stress that the functionality presented at the conference was not an “exhaustive list”, and there will be a need to prioritise, however, he said that home visits, proxy access allowing someone to access the platform on behalf of another, and screening programmes are very much at the forefront of his mind.
Screening, in particular, if it can be better facilitated through MyCare, would be an important step towards the strategic aim of government around the ill-health prevention agenda, as is mental health, which is one of the biggest causes of people being off sick.
Ensuring social care can connect to the app is also high on the priority list.
Cameron said: “This is a critical area. This has been one of the biggest areas that we’ve actually sort of said we’re going into this to make a difference for health and social care, for health and care. It is not just an NHS app.”
He said he is mindful in particular of the need to connect with social work, and for the individual in receipt of services to help drive the app’s progress. Ensuring the appointments functionality can be extended to social care will be key to the app’s development, and also its links to telecare for those in receipt of technology-enabled care packages at home or in the community.
Digital health and care progress is not solely be driven by the app, though.
Cameron highlighted the achievements of the Seer shared data platform, which has brought datasets from across the NHS together, as well as the National Digital Platform, which acts as the ‘middle layer’ through which much of the data to MyCare flows. Federating access across Microsoft 365 between NHS and social care colleagues is an ongoing piece of work to allow practitioners to work more closely together on day-to-day casework.
A new national system for x-Ray and MRI scans will also ‘open up’ how images are stored, accessed and eventually harnessed by AI, and there are efforts underway to more closely integrate with GP IT systems. Cameron also credited BT, which manages the national digital infrastructure for many of the healthcare facilities around the country.
Longer term, work will continue towards the creation of a digital care record, a single electronic record displaying both health and social care information for people to access. Other advances include theatre scheduling, which will reduce the operations backlog in Scotland, which is set to go live in health boards next month, and the national digital prescribing programme will likely herald the end for outdated paper ‘scripts’ to be taken from GP practices to pharmacies by patients.
Cameron said: “I think there’s huge opportunities for care homes, for prisons, for lots of other areas where prescribing and dispensing can be really challenging. So we’re developing a system that is scalable and [will] really drive out the benefits of making that easier for people to have access to.”
None of the thornier issues around data protection and data sharing can be solved, however, without a renewed focus on information governance. Cameron confirmed he is working ‘at pace’ with colleagues from COSLA – the local government umbrella body – the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government and the NHS on putting in place a national Information Governance platform.
“We’ve got to really get away from the pain of data sharing agreements, data protection impact assessments, where 14 people say yes, three people say no,” he said.
“So the idea behind having a core platform is to provide these tools, guidance, support forums, opportunities to connect, and then really make sure that we drive forward projects, programs, the core foundations that we need at pace and scale across Scotland.”
Cameron said it will be key to solving some of the longstanding issues around data-sharing, and will underpin much of the future success of digital health and care in general.
He said: “There’s so many exciting things going on, and I’m really delighted to get to this point with MyCare. I can’t wait for you all to have access to that and for it to start making a difference for yourselves.
“And collectively, though, in partnership, in collaboration, we are making a difference across a lot of areas, and really looking forward to taking all those other things forward as well as we go beyond the initial launch for Digital Front Door and to our future for Scotland.”
