Steering the digital roadmap for healthcare organisations with KCL Digital

KCL Digital help organisations transform their digital agenda through sustainable connections and collaborative partnerships that inspire, empower and deliver change.

As an official exhibitor for the upcoming Healthcare Excellence Through Technology (HETT) conference in September, we caught up with CEO of  KCL Digital, Kay Kadel to discuss challenges in the digital health sector, steering digital roadmaps for healthcare organisations and their debut at HETT Show. 

Kay Kadel: KCL Digital is supporting the healthcare sector with a range of digital transformation solutions from EPR deployments to digital strategy, to infrastructure upgrades and system integration. We are deployment specialists and offer services in the following areas:

1. Collaborative Consultancy: providing consultancy services in procurement, funding opportunities, strategies, and business cases.
2. Managed Service: providing digital transformation through an end-to-end service bespoke to the client’s requirements.
3. Parachuting and Resolution: re-baselining an existing programme of works through a series of achievable set of sprints that brings delivery and output value focussed.
4. Value-Based Resourcing: defined and specific matching of roles against skills, requirements, and organisational values.
5. Deployment Support: providing delivery support for a product or service that is either bespoke or end to end across all workstreams.

We help solve and respond by deploying a specialist team that focuses on delivery and output and adds value at every stage. We place a special emphasis on collaborative delivery by sharing knowledge and abilities throughout our work together. This is accomplished by collaborating with NHS personnel throughout, ensuring that ownership and autonomy are felt from the outset. We collaborate on risks, challenges, and recommendations to guarantee that the delivery is understood and supported at all levels within the trust. This prevents a cumbersome handover to BAU as we exit. We consider a project a success when our departure is unnoticed and the client derives total satisfaction from it.

HETT: Great breakdown of your services! With that being said, what are some of the biggest challenges that you have identified when working closely with your NHS/Care partners?

Kay Kadel: KCL The primary obstacles we face when collaborating with NHS/Care partners often start with seeing a trained and experienced workforce that is hindered by unrecorded processes and a segregated perspective of overall operational priorities and their clash with project delivery.

Other challenges include ensuring senior management buy-in to a proposed piece of work and its’ accurate communication to the organisation and workforce, without which can adversely affect the successful buy-in and delivery of the work.

A lack of decision-making capacity can also impede a programme’s successful progress, often impacting on efficiency, time, and delay, adding to additional resources and potential costs.

Addressing these issues at the outset through our readiness approach can be crucial to our ability to successfully implement a collaborative approach. Without this holistic view, we can sometimes experience a cycle of repetitive delivery, leaving unresolved gaps or issues after a project has been completed. This can lead to the need for either more remediation work or a consulting partner to assist with ongoing operating functions, resulting in an inefficient allocation of resources, as we become unnecessarily utilised for operational support that should be owned internally.

Decision-making is essential to our work, and we ensure that both internal and external teams have the support of the leadership to move forward with recommendations, achieving delivery and value for the user base and the service users.

HETT: With these important factors mentioned, tell us how working with your products and solutions can help tackle some of the challenges that exist within digital health.

Kay Kadel: As a specialist partner to many suppliers of products and services across digital healthcare, we can provide advice that is fit for purpose, practical, and useful in helping organisations to make critical recommendations and decisions on their digital roadmap. We share lessons along the way so that those we work with benefit from our experience. We know how important it is to get this right, from EPR and system deployment to integration and data sharing, to designing and delivering a digital strategy for maturity. We can help make a difference and now with the Integrated Care Boards in place, it's even more critical that we land these programmes successfully.

At KCL Digital, we also advise our partners operating in this space, on how to guarantee they are offering a solution with value to the digital healthcare industry. This may include data exchange in real-time, pre-assessment forms, prescribing modules, and more. KCL Digital is skilled in delivering the integration agenda system-wide, which is increasingly more critical. Alongside our collaborative approach, we provide specialist and targeted help that can be applied to gaps in skills and experiences that can be built concurrently with our collaboration and truly enhance internal capabilities and its investment in staff skillset and retention.

To be assured of this approach when we work with a healthcare client to deliver and partner, we always start with a readiness assessment to find gaps and ensure our delivery is realistic and possible.

HETT:  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?

Kay Kadel: We are excited to be hosting our first stand at HETT 2022 and keen to meet NHS and Healthcare professionals at all levels to learn about their difficulties and triumphs. We enjoy conversing with our clients and partners, and we welcome the opportunity to learn from and network with other individuals and organisations. We know that by collaborating with our peers in the industry, we can all make a difference by working truly collaboratively, sharing knowledge and growth that can be passed on, providing real benefits and support to our clients in the NHS and Healthcare sector for their digital transformation journeys.

On the first evening of HETT 2022, we will organise a local event and are keen to invite NHS and Healthcare industry representatives, as well as our supplier colleagues.

In addition, we will be hosting our annual venture day at our all-female club at Allbright in London with some of our specialist internal healthcare consultants, in November and are very keen to hear from female leaders in particular, especially if they are interested in being a guest speaker at our breakfast event to share their experiences with us.

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

Kay Kadel: This year, KCL Digital is pleased to host its first stand at HETT 2022, and we are looking forward to the experience. In addition, we are excited to meet people from all backgrounds and at all levels of the industry, to learn about their successes and challenges, and to share the insights of our internal consultant with stand visitors. We also intend to cultivate new relationships to form new collaborations, whilst continuing to strengthen existing ones.

Our services range from healthcare integration to product deployment, including e-prescribing and digital strategies, and we are delighted to share some of our success stories with our website and social media connections. Visitors to our stand will also receive some helpful information, as well as some energy boosters to maintain stamina.

In addition, we are thrilled to visit our partners’ stands and meet existing and new colleagues, as well as attend some of the HETT 2022 speaker events and continue our learning and development at KCL Digital so that we are always able to provide the most effective solutions.


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