Michael Odling-Smee
Founding Director, Aire Logic and Aire Innovate
The NHS benefits from an agile approach to digital transformation, according to Michael Odling-Smee, Founding Director of tech and innovation experts, Aire Logic and Aire Innovate.
How are companies like yours supporting digital transformation within the NHS?
We founded the consultancy side of our business, Aire Logic, because we saw how challenging it could be to deliver big technical projects in the NHS and felt we could help improve agility and efficiency. We work with customers in a true partnership to deliver their aims and ensure they have the knowledge and skills to drive future transformation themselves.
The NHS also needs revolutionary tech solutions for improved patient outcomes; so, on the Aire Innovate side of the business, we developed a suite of products. This includes a digital forms engine, a workflow engine and an electronic healthcare record (EHR). These and other tools can be used to build a scalable platform tailored to specific healthcare needs. They’re ‘low code,’ so users effectively become masters of their own destinies. They don’t need us to create new capabilities for them.
What’s the best way to achieve digital transformation within the NHS?
In an agile way. Transformation should be less of a ‘big bang’ event and more of an ongoing process. The NHS does need to make changes to ‘business as usual,’ but taking a ‘big bang’ approach means huge swings in workforce, huge swings in effort and potentially huge failures; whereas an agile approach is incremental — and any failures can feed back into future success.
What are the challenges of the NHS’s current procurement procedures?
Procurement needs to be smarter. There are pockets of good procurement practice but, overall, there’s a tendency within the NHS to say: ‘We have this problem today. What piece of technology will fix it?’ The trouble is that the technology that’s chosen might not solve tomorrow’s problems. There needs to be more lateral thinking about how tech can evolve and flex to meet future needs.
These are human lives, so
there’s no room for error.
How important is systems integration across the NHS for seamless data sharing?
If you buy a new system, it may not talk to all your other systems. It’s why we’re very strong advocates of interoperability and why we wanted to create a super-flexible platform that users could arrange in any way they wanted. There’s still a lot of debate about the importance of different systems adhering to the same technical standards, but most of the challenge comes at the human — rather than technical — level.
Can technology give patients a better healthcare experience?
Absolutely. For instance, better remote communication with their healthcare professional can reduce the constant need for patients to book appointments or be placed back into an over-burdened system. It can also make it easy for the patient to see where they are on the clinical pathway.
How will AI be used in the NHS in the future?
I see it becoming more of a commodity in the next five or 10 years, so the surrounding infrastructure will need to be able to support it. Our platforms are flexible, so plugging in AI is easy. However, there’s a big question about how AI could be used to summarise an EHR so that healthcare professionals can see where each patient is on their healthcare journey. These are human lives, so there’s no room for error.
As a service and tech provider, what does ideal engagement with the NHS look like?
At a recent conference someone said: ‘When the NHS is procuring a supplier, it’s not just procuring a product or a service. It’s procuring a relationship.’ That’s absolutely our view, too. Obviously, we’re alive to the customer-supplier relationship: we’re brought in for a reason, and we’re expected to deliver. But we also want collaboration and to build a relationship of equal partners who work well together and trust each other.
