Managing patient data in dementia services
Research Institute for the Care of Older People (RICE) is a charity supporting people with dementia through providing an NHS funded diagnosis service, clinical trials and academic research looking for effective treatments for dementia.
The charity had been undergoing many changes and looking at how to modernise the organisation. RICE had identified a key need to to update and modernise internal processes and ways in which to move forward from paper based systems and enable a more joined up way of collecting and using data.
Dot Project led RICE through a technology audit and assessment of how digital, and ways of working with digital, can best support the teams. Dot Project documented system requirements and system scanning provided recommendations for new systems.
Summary
Building a roadmap for digital change
Identifying areas for improvement
A technology discovery and audit was our starting point to understand both challenges with the existing ways of working, but also where opportunities might lie to reduce reliance on paper, manual workarounds and consider the integration of existing and new systems.
Working in-person with the team at RICE, Dot Project ran a series of requirements workshops to develop a set of key requirements to digitally strengthen the organisation.
Market scan and recommendations
A market scan shortlisted a number of practice and patient management platforms to meet the majority of needs. This market scan consisted of desk research, interviews with potential suppliers and rapid prototyping in a number of solutions. For each platform we were able to provide detailed information on their requirements fit, costs, opportunities and challenges.
Within this process we were also able to provide commentary of the procurement process and identify platforms that would fulfil requirements.
Guidance
A detailed set of recommendations and mentoring will enable RICE to move forward with budget and capacity allocations to plan for digital change.
With Dot Project's detailed resources and guidance RICE is now able to develop an implementation approach to address technology needs, as well as more deeply guiding the organisation on how the entire team can be ambassadors for the digital journey ahead.
“We really appreciated working with the Dot Project team to help guide RICE towards a digital solution to our data collection. As a small charity with no on-site IT support (or expertise) this felt like a very daunting task for us. Dot Project broke the process down and took out much of the jargon so we could understand what would best suit our needs – and our budget. We are excited about the next steps of this journey as we move towards the implementation phase of a patient management system which will really help streamline how we collect and use our data”. Melissa Hillier, Chief Executive Officer