Greater Manchester selects seven new suppliers for digital health platform

Greater Manchester has selected a further seven suppliers to deliver a digital platform to transform healthcare services across the local area.

The suppliers will be responsible for delivering the Greater Manchester Digital Platform (GMDP), which is aimed at making it safer and quicker for healthcare professionals and members of the public to access the right information.

The platform is part of the Local Health and Care Record (LHCR) programme and is being overseen by Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, on behalf of the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership.

The seven new suppliers include:

• Black Pear – providing two-way integration of GP systems with acute and community settings
• Shaping Cloud – delivering an innovative identity and access management service
• Snowflake – a cloud data platform and an analytics and data science platform
• Janeiro Digital – providing software called XFORM Health which gives people more control of their own health and care data
• Aire Logic – building of e-forms and linking of the various components of the platform to support the storage of citizen data
• Clinical Architecture – Delivering terminology and ‘semantic normalisation’ solutions to harmonise disparate coded data to national standard codes
• Orion Health – development of Greater Manchester Integration Engine to support the integration and message flow across the platform

John Llewellyn, director of digital for LHCR Northern Care Alliance, said: “As a Global Digital Exemplar, Salford Royal has always spearheaded digital advancements to support new and emerging models of care.

“So we’re really excited about the progress of the GMDP programme. Here at the Northern Care Alliance we have a really agile approach and some great new technology. With the GMDP we’ll also have the first ever NHS open platforms to support these and help us drive our digital agenda forward even more.”

Phil Swan, GMCA’s director for digital, added: “We are already using this technology to support Greater Manchester’s Covid-19 emergency response, making it possible for services to quickly share vital information and provide new services like community hubs with volunteer coordination.

“Looking ahead, the possibilities created by building this new digital platform are ground breaking. By digitising old paper-based processes and helping connect data, many of our most vulnerable people can get more joined up support across the region, improving the lives of citizens and making savings.

“The launch of the shared care record plan pilot for frailty and dementia in Tameside and Salford will mean, for the first time, we get bi-directional flow of information across health and social care organisations.”

In November 2019 Civica, Philips Forcare, Objectivity Ltd and ANS were selected to help create the digital platform.

The technology would first be developed and used in the areas of dementia, frailty and health visiting.