Representatives from West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, East of England Ambulance Service, and the national Asthma and Lung charity gathered at the Churchill War Rooms in London recently to discuss how digital communications can be leveraged in different areas of healthcare delivery, promoting better patient engagement and enhanced data protection.
The session, hosted by digital communications specialist, Zivver, was designed to encourage an open conversation regarding transformation in healthcare services.
Sarah Judge, future system digital programme lead and deputy chief information officer at Global Digital Exemplar, West Suffolk Hospital, said: “These events are important for sharing best practice with other healthcare providers.
“It promotes broader thinking to ensure we are working towards standardising email security and engaging internally across different departments.”
To coincide with the event, Zivver launched its second innovation playbook for healthcare, exploring common communication problems that occur in health such as accessibility, safely sharing media and information to and from users, integrating system providers, and using automation to save time.
The playbook helps clinical and non-clinical teams find their problems, consider tools that can help solve these problems, and learn from good practice in other health systems.
In his talk, Liam Cahill, healthcare advisor and co-author of the playbook, said: “Communication is at the heart of healthcare interactions, so improving communications is a necessity.
“However, it presents a myriad of challenges.
“Behaviour change can be disruptive, digital inaccessibility and exclusion for service users increases the complexity, and there is little coherence and compatibility across local systems when channels and connections across partners are so needed.
“Despite the hurdles, it is important that we work together to provide staff with ‘creation tools’ that empower them to transform their services and improve care.”
Oliver Brown, vice president of commercial at Zivver, added: “Receiving tangible insight and feedback from our trusted customers, advisors, and partners is not only vital, but also a blessing.
“It reaffirms Zivver’s mission to improve clinician-to-patient care through secure communication channels, while enabling us to drive continuous innovation to solve integrated healthcare systems’ most-pressing challenges, both now and in the future.”
