Scotland’s digital health and care innovation centre has signed a two-year deal with a ‘unique health platform’ that supports secure health data exchange between patients and clinical care teams.
The Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre – a national resource and collaboration between the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Strathclyde – is to use the Lenus Health Platform to ‘revolutionise digital innovation in health and care across Scotland’.
The platform, designed by Edinburgh digital agency Storm ID, supports secure health data exchange between patients and clinical care teams, providing core service components including identity, consent, security, data capture, curation and storage.
It supports services that can reduce the need for face-to-face outpatient appointments and supports the remote management of conditions – vital in the response to COVID-19 and in reducing waiting times and hospital re-admission rates.
The Lenus platform enforces standards around data interoperability and security using FHIR and SNOMED coding standards and integrates with secondary and primary care systems. Patients using services provisioned on Lenus control their own data and actively consent to share data with their care team.
The platform is designed to be open and has been architected using a suite of APIs to allow for third-party innovation. The DHI will use the platform to foster innovation in health and care via the use of a sandbox environment and a supporting developer portal that provides access to platform APIs.
Innovative new services that are successfully evaluated can move from the sandbox environment to live environments hosted in the NHS, providing a pathway for proven sensors, digital services and other digital health innovations to be evaluated and procured by the NHS.
The platform currently underpins a suite of live digital services that provide routine care delivery across the NHS. These include support for asynchronous outpatient appointments, remote management of COPD and heart failure and a patient facing digital service that supports Scotland’s Test and Protect strategy.
“As developers of digital health services ourselves, we know many of the challenges in jumping from innovative idea to live, operational service. Lenus, with its open, API, standards driven data exchange capability, means innovators can focus on service design without worrying about interoperability, security and compliance. Lenus is a key enabler for digital health innovators looking to accelerate their ideas and we’re thrilled to continue our collaboration with the DHI,” said Paul McGinness, Director at Storm ID.
Chal Chute, Chief Technology Officer at the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre, added: “The DHI plays a pivotal role in supporting the co-design of person-centred digital health and care solutions. The Lenus Health Platform will be made available as a Health Data Exchange as part of a suite of person-centred data sharing tools to support digital health and care innovation. Innovators will be encouraged to come and experiment with these tools, connecting their applications and devices in sandbox environments provided as part of the DHI Exchange initiative. In this way we can ensure that the next generation of digital health and care services are integrated in a person-centred manner from the outset.”