The state of digital maturity across the Scottish healthcare and social care landscape has become less homogenous and more disparate since 2023, and a lower share of the population is served by organisations that lead the field.
That said, overall digital maturity within Scottish healthcare and social care has improved at a steady pace since 2023, driven in part by the digital transformation work of a share of organisations assessed, particularly in the field of ePrescribing, digital records and digital channels. Further, 2024 results suggest that other core Capability areas such as Business and Clinical Intelligence, Standards and Orders & Results Management may be among the next priorities for participating healthcare and social care organisations.
Encouragingly, in some Readiness areas – Information Governance in particular – 2024 results suggest a generally high level of digital maturity nationally. Benefits from maturing processes, policies and controls in this area should ultimately result in less unnecessary constraints on operations across health care and social care in Scotland and thereby contribute to a more positive perception of Information Governance than has been popular in recent years.
Factors such as digital skills and confidence among both the workforce and citizens generally, along with the effectiveness of skills development initiatives continues to challenge organisation’s ability to fully realise the benefits from their digital transformation efforts. That said, staff working within healthcare and social care continue to support digital ways of working; moreover, 2024 results suggest that the use of digital channels by citizens using services has increased by around 15% since 2023.
The delivery of effective digital channels that citizens can use to find and interact with healthcare and social care services is constrained by ongoing challenges around the digital dimensions of integrating care: While organisations tend to gauge themselves as mature in terms strategy, policy and leadership, progress on digitally integrating Capability processes such as providing unified digital channels across local healthcare and social care services has remained limited.
The picture presented by the data from the digital maturity assessment at theme level (E.g., aggregated from 20 sections into 3 categories – Readiness, Capabilities and Infrastructure) suggests less homogeneity than reported in 2023, and a greater divide between the best and worst-performing health and social care systems across the country.
Alongside this development, the share of the population served by a healthcare and social care system we would class as ‘Follower’ or ‘Mid-field’ has increased by around 10 percent and now represents just over a third of the overall Scottish population.
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