Adrian Flowerday talks to us about Docobo celebrating 20 years in digital health in September 2021.

‘We’ve been really looking forward to celebrating Docobo’s 20 year anniversary this September and this occasion has given us a real opportunity to look back over how things have changed in digital technology and look forward to the future!

Over the past 20 years we have engaged in so many different programmes and aspects of healthcare in the UK, the EU and across the globe. We’ve done remote monitoring on falls prevention as part of a EU programme …’I don’t fall, ’ we have worked on heart programmes, such as the IC heart programme … we’ve also been involved in cancer care and Motor Neurone Disease programmes.

Over the years we’ve seen the priority for care has changed. This change has meant that the NHS has to move away from the traditional requirements. With procedures and pharma getting better, people are living longer.

When Docobo started out, it was relatively unusual to have two long term conditions (LTCs). Here we are in 2021 and 25% of the UK’s adult population has two, three or more LTCs – and these are major drivers of cost for the NHS and demand on the frontline.

The NHS Long Term Plan identifies the need to keep people out of hospital where possible and to look after people at home for as long as possible – recognising that people living at home are now living with higher acuity conditions. Levels of acuity in primary care have risen so it’s bordering on the impossible to look after all patients in the traditional sense.

With all the developments and challenges over 2020 and 2021 – we are now in the space where a patient’s natural interface with the NHS will be online and – with all that’s happened during the COVID pandemic – we’re finding that people are recognising this.

Another major change we have observed over 20 years is that the NHS has an ongoing issue with capacity and there are too few doctors and nurses. We can’t respond to the demands on the NHS in the conventional manner. So, to optimise efficiency and deployment of skills in the NHS and to increase productivity – everyone is starting to recognise that technology has an important role to play in healthcare.

We’ve been applying the technology to different aspects of care which has enabled us to have a really deep understanding of clinical needs and primary and secondary care.

As patients will now not automatically see their GP as the first point of call, we’ve been looking at how patients will get better care, how we can address equity and equality and we have learned how to avoid digital exclusion. We’re now at the stage where we are looking at primary and secondary care integration, in order to help enable secondary care skills to be deployed in primary care while patients are at home. We can now help enable shorter length of stays for patients in hospital.

Let’s take a look at some of our clients by way of an example. In Liverpool, they’ve been doing telehealth and remote monitoring for nearly 10 years now and they know the direction of travel, as well as the possibilities of how to use this technology in the best way. In Warwickshire, from an initial successful rollout to all the care homes, we now see DOC@HOME being used to support COPD virtual wards both in PCN’s and from the acutes, supporting recovery by helping to reduced bed days and overcome the backlog.

So now that the barriers are gone – and we’ve got 20 years under our belt – we’ve got a really rich array of capability which enables us to help and support transformation of primary care into more proactive and preventative care, helping keep people out of hospital.

For the last 18 months, we’ve been flat out busy and it’s great for us to be able to deploy everything we’ve learned over the last 20 years! Here’s to the next 20 years – which offers an exciting future for digital health!’