Requirements gathering for the Connecting Care programme

Requirements gathering is an important step to ensure suppliers provide a solution that meets the needs of patients, healthcare professionals and our other stakeholders and partners.

Being able to access and record information remotely through apps, safely integrating artificial intelligence and supporting the delivery of care through virtual wards are some of the requirements that have been identified for solutions provided by the Connecting Care programme.

Andy Barnes, a Business Analyst at Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) discussed the ongoing requirements gathering process for the Connecting Care programme.

It has been a huge privilege to lead the requirements gathering process for Connecting Care across NHS Wales with the DHCW team. The aim is to meet the needs of healthcare professionals and the people of Wales through a solution that safely and securely captures information that can be shared across community, mental health and social care services.

The solution will provide clinicians and practitioners with the essential information they need to understand, and better treat patients, while also improving efficiencies through digitisation and information sharing.

While it has been a big challenge to include all the relevant stakeholders to ensure a patient-centred, clinically focussed solution, it has been great to see the health boards and local authorities work closely together to develop a solution for NHS Wales. This approach has been recognised by Directors of Digital across NHS Wales and the DHCW Executive team.

The team began by developing a set of basic ‘Epics’ or high-level use cases. These were then expanded into detailed requirements which focused on the patient care journey, covering referral, treatment, and discharge. and case load management, the important back-office functions concerned with managing changes to caseloads. These requirements were gathered from across NHS Wales, drawing on insights from similar procurements.

In Summer and Autumn 2023, a series of workshop sessions were held with our specialist DHCW Clinical Informaticists, Care Champions, and representatives from each health board region. The aim of these sessions was to validate the approach, review and refine the requirements, and ensure they were comprehensive enough for procuring new solutions for social and healthcare services. Complex social and health scenarios provided by the health boards were used to cross-reference the requirements, ensuring any scenario, or combination of scenarios across Wales was fully addressed.

Since February 2024, the focus has been on using these requirements to guide the procurement process with DHCW procurement specialists.

A final validation step is currently underway with the health boards to complete the mental health, and community health requirements. This will enable the procurement of a solution to complete in the near future, paving the way for better integration of information and transformational care service delivery for the people of Wales.