Making services accessible to those who use them via digital channels wherever appropriate is a strategic objective for the healthcare and social care sectors in Scotland. Most participating organisations have made inroads into their digital service offerings, but for many, there is still some way to go before those objectives are met. Quantitatively, only a […]

Organisations who scored high in the Business and Clinical Intelligence category tended to also score higher for management-related categories (Strategic Alignment, Leadership, Resourcing, Governance, Information Governance), supporting the hypothesis that data-driven approaches support better management of digital transformation and digital operations.

Across the digital maturity assessment, organisations who have embraced digital ways of working as part of their management infrastructure and can draw on digital resources to support their plans and decisions, outperformed organisations who operate in a less embedded way. Key attributes for effective digital management included embracing digital ways of working both amongst leadership […]

As part of the assessment, staff completing a separate staff survey component consistently reported generic digital benefits around workplace productivity and efficiency, although so far, those capabilities translated into more direct patient/service user time only for some organisations. Most organisations have adopted skills development as a necessary component of their digital maturity journey. Most often, […]

When it comes to the availability and suitability of basic technology, our assessment found extreme differences between participating organisations. While Wi-Fi access for healthcare and social care professionals was generally reported to be at least partially available, Wi-Fi for patients and service users was available only sporadically for some organisations (see grey bar in adjacent […]

Looking at the data from the digital maturity assessment at theme level (e.g., aggregated from 20 sections into 3 categories – Readiness, Capabilities and Infrastructure), the national picture divides participating health and care systems into three groups: Leaders, Mid-Field and Followers.

Moreover, this assessment shows that the national solutions being made available are not yet being adopted consistently; adoption rates for national solutions for Picture Archiving and Communication (PACS) were most consistently mentioned as being in use among participating organisations.

Interrogating the assessment data by topic illustrates the degree of variance between the levels of digital maturity participating organisations have reported. This fact may well give rise to potential strategic approaches to the issues at hand: Highly concentrated scores (e.g., Asset and Resource Optimisation, Digital Channels) show that organisations are at a comparable level of […]

The digital integration of healthcare and social care systems is an ongoing process, with most participating organisations receiving only a share of referrals digitally, and only a share of those digital referrals entering the workflow without manual intervention, thereby potentially undoing any benefits that may otherwise have been gained from digitising referrals. Moreover, most organisations […]

Analysis of those parts of the assessment concerned with adoption for certain key metrics (e.g., Digital health records, structured data, medicines administration logs, digital care handovers, adoption of digital channels, use of service user IDs and Wi-Fi availability, amongst others) shows that the nation is currently ‘mid-journey’ towards digital maturity. Topics around providers’ ability to […]