Covid-19 Response

Summary

The Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) has been commissioned, and continues to be actively involved, in supporting the Scottish Government’s national response to the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since March 2020 we have initiated six new Covid-19 projects to produce high quality products that are being deployed into a live service to support the population of Scotland (patients and health and social care staff) at this critical point.

We have established close working relationships with all key partners across Scotland, including the Digital Directorate, NHS Scotland Digital, NES and TEC as well as national and territorial health boards, the Digital Office for Local Government and key third sector and independent sector organisations.

Several academic and industry partners have been engaged to support our work, including several Scottish SMEs: Storm ID, Sitekit, Daysix, Tactuum and Cohesion, along with Scottish Enterprise.

The success of the projects to date has been down to excellent partners collaborating and co-designing together!

Our Approach

The DHI team deployed a variety of interactive, online tools to develop and define solutions and services through collaboration and co-design with our stakeholders.

Project workshops with technologists, clinicians, designers, NHS staff and Scottish Government representatives gathered experience-based insights to plan for wider integration.

The DHI team have gone above and beyond to deliver or drive forward the tools and systems that have made a major difference to citizens and key workers across Scotland.

Jonathan Cameron

Deputy Director – Digital Health and Care, Scottish Government

Impact & Value

The National Notification Service has changed the way Scottish health boards view and communicate test results, relieving the front line of the burden of administrating thousands of test results so that they could focus on the higher impact health protection duties
The Simple Tracing Tools equipped all 14 Scottish health boards with the digital means to capture contact tracing data during peak Covid-19. 733 clinical users were onboarded and they traced 1618 index cases and their contacts over a 2 month period at peak – this allowed Scotland to leave full lockdown earlier
The Clinical Assessment Tool has been used for over three thousand assessments of patients in the Glasgow area. It has fed early intelligence into surveillance systems to help identify outbreaks earlier. This is currently being scaled up to other boards in Scotland
The Covid Community Co-management tools have been developed and user research completed – with the Scottish population demonstrating their support for a more active digital role in contact tracing. This tool is due to go live later in the autumn in 2020 and will help with the expected increase in Covid-19 cases over the winter period

Check out our case study: Covid-19 National Notification & Digital Tracing Service