International Collaboration - Sharing Strategies and best practice

National Virtual Health Team -Delivering Video Enabled Care                                                                                                                                        

Prior to the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic mPower, an SEUPB funded cross border project, delivered a solution for Video Enabled Care (VEC) to older people in the border areas of Ireland. A key partner on this project, NHS National Services Scotland were already effectively using AttendAnywhere, named Near Me in Scotland. The National Virtual Health Team (NVHT) used these connections to engage with Scottish colleagues to gain knowledge, strategies and capture good practice in rolling out, delivering and scaling up AttendAnywhere VEC solution nationally across Ireland.

International User Group Membership

Within the HSE, the rapid roll-out of AttendAnywhere required collaboration with clinicians and users of this VEC platform. This stakeholder engagement resulted in gathering valuable feedback on the platform design, usage and issues. The NVHT shared this information with the AttendAnywhere Vendor who developed proposed solutions, workarounds and fixes in line with what was required. Some of these changes helped to shape the future of the AttendAnywhere VEC platform, and resulted in the NVHT joining this International User Group.

The International User Group, included countries such as: Scotland, Wales, England, Ireland and Australia.

The benefits of being part of this International User Group are:

• Direct influence in the design and direction of the product in line with patient and clinician needs.
• Alignment of roadmap priorities with those of the clinical teams.
• Participation in testing groups for example; alpha and beta testing of new releases.
• Shared learning from user groups.
• Service participation, which helps the AttendAnywhere development team understand the service, their needs and requirements to build effective solutions.
• Ongoing improvements built on customer feedback to benefit all stakeholders.

Through international collaboration, stakeholder engagement, shared learnings and clinical participation, the NVHT achieved a sustainable service change without reinventing the wheel.

We wish to thank our colleagues within the International User group, who openly shared their learning and best practices with us.

‘The eHealth strategy for Ireland has been built up from many data sources and information repositories including; previous international experiences’ - E health strategy  - Methodology

Awards:

An international partnership between mPower, NHS NSS and the HSE won the Innovation Organisation of the Year award at the Causeway Ireland Scotland Business 2020  

Project Contact: 

Elaine Aughey 
National Virtual Health Team

email:  Elaine.Aughey@hse.ie