The Digital Health Partnership Award has been created to help NHS organisations in England to bid for funding to accelerate the adoption of digital health technologies to support patients with long term conditions.

As part of round 2 of the Digital Health Partnership Award Tiny Medical Apps will be working with ICSs across England to deliver the Digital Health Passport and improve asthma self-management for children and young people.

Asthma Self Management for Children and Young People

This project offers a step change in asthma self-management and remote monitoring, with an opportunity to improve outcomes for hundreds of thousands of children and young people.

This funding application was led by North East London CCG Digital First Team and is supported by NHS England and NHS Improvement’s Children and Young People’s Transformation Programme. The technology partner is Tiny Medical Apps (TMA), developers of the Digital Health Passport, led by an NHS A&E doctor and an NHS systems developer.

The focus on childhood asthma is needed and timely. The UK has some of the worst outcomes from asthma for children and young people (CYP) in Europe, including preventable deaths. Recognising the higher risk of asthma attacks associated with deprivation and poor air quality, North East London has made children’s asthma a priority area. The region now has a reputation for excellence in childhood asthma quality improvement (HSJ Paediatric Initiative award winner 2021).

Digital tools such as the Digital Health Passport (DHP) offer the opportunity to improve health outcomes, patient and clinician satisfaction and reduce the costs of service delivery. The DHP is rated at 89% by ORCHA UK.

Child health, respiratory conditions and digital access to care plans are NHS priority areas (NHS Long Term Plan). NHS England and NHS Improvement have recently published the National Bundle of care for children and young people with asthma which sets out standards of care around each element of the CYP asthma pathway. Attached to each standard is an ICS deliverable, a number of enablers and measures of success, many of which are addressed in this project.

Participating organisations will be challenged to provide targeted engagement to help tackle digital inclusion. For example, organising one-to-one onboarding in selected GP practices.

Digital maturity varies nationally. Each ICS region will have a range of adoption and sustainability hurdles to overcome when assessed using the NASSS framework. The project team proposes to implement and evaluate solutions at three distinct levels of digital readiness (core, connected and integrated). This means that any ICS can start their CYP digital asthma transformation work immediately and deliver value that matches the digital maturity in their region.

Project goals:

  • Improve self-management of CYP with asthma
  • Provide a sustainable, cost-effective tool for Integrated Care Systems to meet the deliverables of the National Bundle of care for CYP with asthma
  • Develop an exemplar, fully-integrated and patient-centred digital care pathway for asthma

Outcomes

  • Improved skills, knowledge and confidence to self-manage (patient activation)
  • Reduced demand on urgent, emergency and primary care
  • Integrated asthma care planning and improved system efficiency

Hurdles

  • Health inequalities – asthma has greater impact on deprived communities
  • ICS at different levels of digital immaturity and operational readiness
  • Overstretched front-line staff