Ideal health: building strategies for digital transformation

Ideal Health Consultants offers expert strategic consultancy, effective project delivery and skilled specialist resources for healthcare organisations.

As an official exhibitor for the upcoming Healthcare Excellence Through Technology (HETT) conference in September, we caught up with Ideal's Marketing Director, Katy Lethbridge to discuss digital transformation strategies and more.

Katy Lethbridge: Ideal is exclusively focused on Digital Transformation in Health and Care. We have worked with over 150 healthcare organisations at the local, regional and national level, and across all care settings, to support the successful delivery of digital transformation.

We provide expert strategic consultancy, effective project delivery and skilled specialist resources to complement an organisation’s own capabilities and capacity.
We offer expertise across the early stages of transformation including digital strategy, digital maturity modelling, business cases and procurement, plus full implementation support (programme and technical), change and learning management, optimisation and data management.

Our support is tailored to client needs and has ranged from a full strategic implementation partnership providing an end-to-end managed service across all programme workstreams to delivering individual digital projects or providing specialist teams and individuals.



HETT: Brilliant! Considering the impact on the NHS post-pandemic, what are some of the biggest challenges that you have identified when working closely with your NHS/Care partners?

Katy Lethbridge: Our NHS/Care partners have had a massively challenging few years with the pandemic response, increase in demand, care backlogs, funding challenges, and structural changes such as the development of ICBs and formalisation of ICSs.

There has been an accelerating rate of change, including increased requirements for partnership working (locally and regionally), targets and timeframes for improved digital maturity, and numerous digital and organisational transformation programmes.

These changes are essential to help health and care function efficiently and effectively, but ensuring capability and capacity for successful change against the background of such a demanding BAU (business as usual) environment is a major challenge in itself.

HETT: Capacity and capabilities are definitely key areas to consider when delivering a bespoke strategy. Tell us how working with your products and solutions can help tackle some of the challenges that exist within digital health.

Katy Lethbridge: Essentially, our expertise and services can help solve some of those issues of capability and capacity, by filling the gaps for organisations undertaking digital transformation.

• Stakeholder Engagement
  We are skilled and experienced in stakeholder engagement and work closely with our clients to understand their current challenges, strategic transformation drivers and future digital needs, to support meaningful strategies for digital investment and change.
  
  
• HIMSS Digital Health Technology Partner
  As the UK’s most experienced HIMSS Digital Health Technology Partner, we apply global standards to digital maturity modelling, assessing continuity of care, service delivery, infrastructure, data, and analytics capabilities, baselining digital maturity and building the business change approach and roadmap for successful digital transformation.
  
  
• EPR Implementation
  We are experienced in working strategically and at scale in complex digital healthcare environments and understand the challenges, priorities, workflows, processes and roles. For example, we have supported over 40 EPR implementations; including requirements specification, business cases and procurement, programme design, change management, full implementation support, data management, learning and adoption services (training and go-live), and post-go-live optimisation.
  
  
• Data Management for NHS Trusts
  We have considerable experience in patient data management for NHS Trusts, undertaking data validation and root cause analysis, and actioning patient-centric solutions that dramatically improve data accuracy, streamline waiting-list reporting and support elective care recovery.
  
  
• Digital Workforce Development
  We even have our own Ideal Academy to support Digital Workforce Development (especially in this ‘Year of the Digital Profession’). Our Academy provides CPD for specialist consultants and NHS staff working on digital health projects to build their technical capabilities and soft skills.

Our complete capability approach is founded on considerable in-house expertise supported by a large network of specialist consultants, enabling us to provide the exact mix of experience, skills and capacity for each individual client programme.

HETT: Great breakdown of your services! We will be hosting HETT Connect again this year, enabling speakers to meet with exhibitors on a 1:1 basis. Who are you hoping to meet?

Katy Lethbridge: Given the breadth of Ideal’s service offering, we are always aiming to share knowledge and ideas across the whole digital health landscape. This enables us to stay up-to-date and to support our clients with sector knowledge and lessons learnt. So, we would be delighted to meet any speakers who are leaders, enablers, or influencers of digital transformation.

HETT: As HETT Show approaches (27-28 Sept @ExCeL London), tell us what you are looking forward to the most at HETT Show 2022.

Katy Lethbridge: HETT is always a great event for learning what is new in our sector, meeting up with colleagues and clients, and starting conversations with new contacts. It is valuable to us as a business, both for what we learn and who we meet. HETT is a ‘must attend' in our event calendar!

HETT: Thank you for your time today, Katy. It’s been a pleasure catching up with you and learning more about how  Ideal contributes to the evolution of the healthcare sector. We look forward to seeing you at HETT Show (27th & 28th September, ExCeL London)!