Healthcare
With over 20 years experience delivering digital solutions to meet complex problems, Answer are a trusted partner delivering value to NHS organisations and at the forefront of some of the most technically and operationally innovative projects in 21st century healthcare.
Our expertise
We bring leading technical knowledge and a proven ability to deliver digital transformation across a variety of health and care settings. We have a particularly strong history of partnership with the NHS on nationally significant innovations, advancing personalised and digitally-enabled healthcare provision.
Amongst our many achievements in this sector, we are particularly proud of our work with NHS Digital, NHS X and local NHS organisations.
Our experience enables us to navigate complex challenges with confidence and expertise. We have a deep understanding of the organization's history, culture, and stakeholders, which enables us to develop effective and sustainable strategies that align with the organization's goals and values. We possess a strong knowledge of healthcare policies, regulations, and trends, and use this knowledge to anticipate and address emerging issues.
We have been instrumental in designing, architecting and delivering national capabilities supporting integrated care across the NHS.
Answer is providing infrastructure and delivery support to enable digital transformation at a national level, which will change the face of how healthcare is delivered in the 21st century.
Our consultants and service designers analyse processes and workflows to optimise them to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Working with the biggest Trust in the country, Answer is providing specialist integration support and enabling changes in the way frontline care is delivered across 10 hospitals in Greater Manchester.
Answer in action
We’re proud to work in partnership with a variety of healthcare organisations. Here are just some of our most recent achievements in the health sector.
Answer Digital are working with NHS England to deliver an interoperability strategy to support Virtual Wards. Virtual wards enable patients who would otherwise be in hospital to receive the acute care, monitoring and treatment they need in their own home. Currently data sharing arrangements between remote monitoring platforms and the Acute EPR systems often rely on manual data transcription or bespoke integrations with limited functionality.
The aim of the first phase has been to understand the current virtual ward technology landscape and interoperability requirements, develop a prioritised backlog of data sharing problems and demonstrate that a standards-based approach is technically feasible and beneficial. This first 6-month phase has included a national-scale Discovery running in parallel to a local 'first of type' implementation working with 4 ICSs and focusing on a priority use case. The next phase of work will include expanding the initial draft standard to cover a wider set of data items, widening the first-of-type to other ICSs, exploring a secondary use case and seeking national approval for the the draft interoperability standard.
The ultimate aim is to make it easier for virtual ward staff, and others involved in caring for patients during and after a VW stay, to deliver the care efficiently and effectively - and with all the right information available. This in turn will drive up the utilisation of the rapidly expanding VW capacity, and contribute to easing pressures on the NHS nationally.
We are developing AI Deployment Engine (AIDE) with the AI Centre for Value Based Healthcare. This platform will enable Trusts to deploy AI models into clinical workflows, allowing AI models to aid clinicians in delivering care, alongside an App Store for Trusts to view available models they wish to use. Answer is developing this system and deploying it into 10 NHS Trusts covering approvals for Information Governance (IG), clinical safety and security.
Alongside AIDE, we are developing the Federated Learning Implementation Platform with the AI Centre for Value Based Healthcare. FLIP utilises a federated learning approach to allow AI models to securely train on NHS data. Each FLIP Trust provides data to train models into a secure enclave within their own technical boundaries, enabling models to be trained on large data sets whilst ensuring data controllers remain in control. Answer are developing this system and deploying it into 7 NHS Trusts covering approvals for Information Governance (IG), security and the HRA.
Answer Digital are working with NHS England in the GP interoperability programme to help set a number of standards and capabilities to allow authorised Clinicians such as GPs, NHS 111 Clinicians, Care Home Nurses in care settings such as a Care Home or Secondary Care Trusts access to the GP records of the patients they are treating via a secure NHS digital service called GP Connect. There are a number of capabilities within GP connect that will enable faster and secure access to your GP record - Access record structured, Send document, Update record, Patient facing services and Update record. We are also developing the National integration adaptors for GP2GP migrations as well as looking to set a strategic direction for the future of GP2GP by developing APIs and data standards.
To support Oxford University Hospital in building the Thames Valley and Surry Secure Data Environment, we are developing a scalable process for mapping clinical data into the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM) that is readily consumable by researchers. The OMOP CDM is the preeminent data model within the clinical data analytics research community, and making data in the SDE available in the OMOP model will enable a wide range of standard research tools and models to be brought to bear on research data and problems rapidly and consistently. We are defining a scalable mapping process with an associated governance structure to map data from the current representation within the SDE to the OMOP CDM, enabling OUH to integrate and harmonise data from a wide variety of sources into the standardised model, increasing efficiency for the data team and clinical researchers.
"At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, NHS Digital faced the challenge of delivering proactive end-to-end monitoring of vital operational services to ensure smooth functioning of the health service during the crisis. The organization needed to set up a strategic IT Operations Centre (ITOC) to provide real-time monitoring of live services and develop effective operating response procedures to quickly address any issues that may arise.
We stepped in to help NHS Digital set up the ITOC and improve its operational response procedures. Answer played a critical role in identifying the key services to monitor, locating the necessary data, integrating it into Splunk, defining alert thresholds and response procedures. The team also provided support to develop improved operating response procedures.
Thanks to Answer Digital's data work, NHS Digital was able to establish the ITOC and leverage real-time monitoring to ensure smooth operations during the COVID-19 crisis. The ITOC became a central part of the way the NHS manages live services, providing critical insights and allowing quick responses to any issues that may arise. As a result, NHS Digital was able to improve its operational efficiency, enhance patient care, and ultimately save lives."
"The Department of Health and Social Care required a partner to lead in the design and development of the COVID Pass API for use by all citizens across the UK.
At the outset of the COVID certificate programme the proposed architecture and proof of concept was a proprietary API. Answer used our experience with healthcare interoperability, and transformed this proposal to use FHIR (“Fire”) open healthcare information exchange standards to provide citizen healthcare information to the API. Answer also uplifted the API to be compliant with the newly forming EU Digital COVID Certificate (DCC) standard. This enabled the API to be used beyond England across Devolved Administrations, Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories (Wales, Channel Islands, Gibralter and The Falklands).
The API forms part of a full-stack digital solution in the form of a web application, which is integrated into the wider NHS estate through both the NHS website and NHS app helping to drive the mass adoption of the NHS App for users and making it the most downloaded app of 2021.
Over 18 months later Answer Digital remains at the core of the NHS COVID Pass Programme (Now operating as a BAU Service under the NHS BSA) providing architectural services and skills, shaping the way that the COVID Pass was designed and is still delivered today. AD architects were an integral part of the successful Government Digital Service (GDS) service assessment in September 2022 which resulted in the programme receiving a standard of “Met” by the Central Digital & Data Office (CDDO)."
Partnering with NHS Digital, Answer Digital have designed and the National Record Locator (NRL) and the National Events Management Service (NEMS). The NRL and the NEMS enable information sharing between health and social care organisations across a range of care settings, building national interoperability standards for proactive notification (NEMS) and retrospective retrieval of information (NRL). The NRL and the NEMS are now running as live services, across a variety of use cases and care settings. The services currently provide access to over 450,000 records, and we are supporting the continued roll out at local, regional and national levels.
We provide architecture support including solution and technical expertise. We support the CTO and wider informatics team, providing in-house Electronic Patient Record (EPR) development, integration services and programme support – crucial in the delivery of efficient digital transformation across the Trust, enabling world-class digitally enabled care.
We have played a central role, overseeing the implementation of the National Genomic Information System into live service across the country.