Health services experience year-on-year demand increase, against a backdrop of increasingly scarce resource - not only in Nordics, but all over Europe. Health systems have seen piecemeal solutions fail to address the mounting pressure of scaling patient need across services, triggering an interest in trialling dramatically new ways of working. Healthcare organisations have been trialing different approaches, from patients being able to independently navigate services and complete assessments, or tasks independently, with technology navigating people to the right service, at the right time; to Health care professionals using the automation and artificial intelligence to ensure their time is spent where it is needed most. However, adoption across whole systems is required to deliver efficiencies at scale, and it is essential to avoid creating silos of innovation that cannot tackle the scale of the need in healthcare. The greatest barrier in the success of whole system transformation is workforce adoption after implementation, as demonstrated by the incredible fact that fax systems are still used to communicate patient data disregarding eventual bans (for reference, UK banned fax 2 years ago).

In UK,  the NHS has made major national investments to embed best practice. They have allowed clinical experts to develop standard operating procedures – SOPs – that can be used as a template to make it easy for healthcare providers to start working in new ways and facilitate the scale up of effective practice. Some initiatives that received particular attention are patient-initiated follow-ups (PIFU) and Virtual wards – virtual care wards that support care in patient's home with, among other things, remote monitoring via apps, digital care platforms and medical equipment. 

In this lecture, Marc Farr and Jake Arnold-Forster (guests from the UK) talk through the application of SOPs, discuss how they are created and made available in healthcare clinics and enhancing them with digital technology, how this helps to scale up innovative ways of working in line organisation and what effects this has created.