The NHS needs innovation, but unfortunately the health service is not always easy to change.
“Because I’ve worked in the NHS before I know how tricky it can be when you’ve got new ideas and new things to implement,” says Andrea Haworth, head of clinical services for Congenica. “Getting people to do things in different ways is always difficult.”
Haworth is currently working to get Congenica’s cloud-based genome analytics software Sapientia more widely adopted across the NHS, and to this end has joined the NHS Innovation Accelerator – a programme that that aims to help introduce mature innovations into the NHS that can address the health service’s efficiency and budget problems.
“I thought it would be really useful for the company to be able to access a centralised network where our issues could be heard,” she says. “It raises the profile of the issues that people are facing, such as the problems with information governance that we were having, that other people would have sooner or later.”
Haworth says that implementation is often a challenge for disruptive, digital technologies. “Disruptive is an overused term but you do need to change how you’re doing your work. You don’t need to change your workflow but you need to use a different system and think about things in a different way. For example, instead of printing everything out, which is traditionally what everyones has done, our software captures it all in a single interface – but people find that difficult to deal with. They say ‘I need to print it out’, and when you ask why, they say ‘I just do’! There’s lots of little things like that.”
Similarly, the fact that the software is cloud-based caused some issues originally. “We don’t take patient-identifiable data but we do take pseudo-anonymised patient genetic data, and that causes some consternation because it’s new to put things like that on the cloud. Initially, when we met with individual NHS Trusts, a common response was “data cannot be processed or stored offsite”. That’s the default position most Trusts took, but we’ve probably broken through that barrier now because as soon as one or two labs start doing it other people feel comfortable.”
Part of the solution has been to work with labs to get their feedback on the software. “We ask them what they would want to see in the software if it were perfect for them,” says Haworth
Actually getting support from the trusts can be difficult too, says Haworth. “In some trusts I’ve worked at there’s little drive for change at all, aside from a token visit from someone who takes you through lean working training. That isn’t a culture change, it’s just a change in operations, and they don’t understand that some of it doesn’t make sense.”
At the end of the day, Haworth says that the way forward needs to involve understanding and collaborative efforts.
“Because a lot of us were embedded in the NHS, we understand the slow pace and we understand the reasons,” she says. “Because of that we also understood how to speed it along a bit. You also have to try to accept that sometimes people go at different paces, and you have to just try and work with them to help them as much as possible, without trying to force it upon them.”
Look out for our in-depth feature on the challenges of innovating in the NHS in our upcoming July/August issue
