Digital Strategy

We understand that embedding an ambitious and coherent digital vision and roadmap across an organisation, given operational pressures, is a significant challenge.

Our digital strategy methodology uses the Blueprint for Digitally Advanced Hospitals (insert reference/link), which we developed for NHSx and that has been adopted widely by NHS England’s New Hospital Programme. The blueprint sets out an ambitious vision for world-class care enabled by next-generation technology that is informed by international best practices.

Our digital strategy methodology recognises that by embracing the opportunities provided by digital technology and data, we can maximise safety, quality, and productivity benefits in addition to delivering integrated care more widely across different care settings. Our methodology provides the framework for rapidly prioritising and implementing key technology and digital interventions to support the delivery of an organisation’s tactical and strategic objectives.

Digital Workplace Transformation

NHS organisations face multiple staffing-related challenges: new staff recruitment, the retention of experienced, skilled staff and staff morale. Organisations are partly addressing this through a transition to ‘employer of choice’, increasing the digital enablement of staff and processes and reducing technology friction. However, process inefficiencies and technology challenges hamper the delivery of HR outcomes.
We bring Digital Workplace strategies to life and help organisations deliver a best-in-class ESR and HR experience. We provide teams of transformation experts to re-engineer key HR processes, automate them using Intelligent Automation (RPA/AI/ML) and Office 365, integrate them with ESR and be change agents, ensuring high levels of engagement and stickiness for new ways of working.

EPR Transformation

NHS England’s Frontline Digitisation Programme has received £2bn of funding to level up clinical systems deployments across the NHS, thereby supporting the acceleration of digital transformation across the NHS.

Such large-scale and rapid systems deployment in support of service transformation requires NHS organisations to address not just significant technical issues but also major operational and cultural challenges. Atos is helping organisations make sense of the rapidly evolving EPR market by assessing the options for levelling up, setting convergence strategy, establishing robust Green Book-compliant business cases, supporting procurement, and ensuring the right capabilities, governance models, and change programmes are in place to drive successful deployment.

For EPR adoption, we use Atos’s Breakaway EPR adoption methodology, incorporating elements from the NHS Change Management Toolkit, to provide coaching, upskilling and 1:1 consulting on how to design a successful change and transformation programme.

Intelligent Automation

Intelligent Automation can help an NHS organisation address workforce challenges, increase productivity, and improve the patient experience. With the need to reduce long and increasing backlogs, the current challenge for the NHS is how to adopt at scale Intelligent Automation tools that were rolled out quickly during the pandemic. Transitioning localised automation point solutions to robust enterprise-wide automation frameworks with ‘industrial standard’ support arrangements.
Our Automation experts, in partnership with NHS England, created the first-ever national guidance for NHS organisations to plan, implement and sustain RPA (insert ref/link).

We help healthcare providers benefit hugely from tools including RPA, AI and ML, automating manual processes and addressing workarounds/productivity gaps. Improving patient flow and discharge timeliness through advanced analytics and predictive algorithms.

Technology Transformation

Successful digital transformations require stable technical foundations. Many NHS organisations are struggling with significant levels of technical debt, including out-of-support infrastructure, applications that have not been updated for years, skill shortages, data centres that are not fit for purpose and poorly integrated best-of-breed system portfolios. The consequence of this is typically poor system availability and performance, poor value for money from IT spending and increased cyber vulnerabilities.

We help our customers strengthen their technology capabilities and enable the journey to the cloud using our unique ‘Decision Factory’ approach and discovery tools. Our consultants start by reviewing an NHS customer’s ITIL capabilities, data centre, network, applications portfolio, and technology architectures to identify points of failure and technology risk. We then work with technology leaders to design robust future state configurations and pragmatic and affordable migration roadmaps, governance, and change strategies so technology can be matured safely and at a pace that makes sense. Ensuring existing technology teams are empowered to be successful when adopting new and transformative paradigms such as cloud-native, Agile and DevOps and helping our clients rationalise their technology portfolios and provide a seamless experience for their users.