The Department of Health (DH) is to soon seek expressions of interest for a large scale project examining how technology can be used to keep patients with long term conditions out of hospital.
The Integrated Care and Assistive Technology (ICAT) project, outlined earlier this year in the DH white paper Our Health Our Care Our Say, aims to cover a million people over three sites and will run for two years from the end of 2006.
Last week the DH published Making It Happen, a progress report on the white paper, and included more information on the ICAT project.
The report says the aim of the ICAT sites is to demonstrate on a wide scale how integrated approaches to care with joint health and social care teams, supported by intensive use of assistive technologies and home monitoring, can achieve a significant shift from hospital care.
The DH is finalising the application prospectus and expressions of interest will soon be sought from partnerships of primary care trusts and local authorities. The DH says successful partnerships will be supported through a detailed planning phases before implementation.
The report also says the DH is involved in ongoing work with the NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency and the Care Services Improvement Partnership to gather intelligence on developments in integrated care and the telehealth/telecare sectors and to define the procurement options for the pilots.
It adds: “In parallel we have been working with the Department of Trade and Industry on how to stimulate UK industry interest in this sector. NHS Connecting for Health has been providing support in identifying the key technical barriers to the scalability of telehealth/telecare.”
The original white paper said the ICAT project would also provide an opportunity to pilot a joint health and social care electronic record although no mention is made of this in Making It Happen.
Other areas covered in Making It Happen include progress on the NHS Life Check, a proposal to enable patients to complete an online self assessment of their health and send it electronically to their GP to be stored as part of their record.
The report says initially Life Checks will be developed for us at three key stages, the first year of life, adolescence and mid-life (age 50-60), and work has begun on developing an offline questionnaire and paper-based prototype. Pilot sites are to begin using the Life Checks next year and scoping and design to develop on the online tool and NHS Life Check website are due to take place by March next year.
The report also says that as well as two national pilots of computerised cognitive behavioural therapy the CSIP is starting smaller scale regional pilots in different settings and on different scales. The national model may be rolled out to other centres across England in 2006/7.
The Department of Health also announced last week that people with long term conditions or social care needs will receive "information prescriptions", which will tell them how to find out more about their condition.
This was another commitment included in the community care white paper and means patients in selected groups will be gioven individual prescriptions which will point them to the relevant websites, resources and support groups for their condition.
Health minister Rosie Winterton said that information prescriptions will be trialled in a series of pilots running until the end of 2007, initially focusing on cancer and mental health and later on vulnerable older people. By 2008 it is expected that everyone with a long-term condition will routinely receive information about how to deal with their condition and where to go for support.
Related documents
Our health, our care, our say: making it happen
Making it happen: pilots, early implementers and demonstration sites
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