The Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership’s Digital Programme is celebrating a double dose of success, after its Combined Intelligence for Population Health Action (CIPHA) programme scooped the Best Use of Data award at the HTN Awards 2021. Shortly followed by former Digital Programme Lead Paul Charnley taking home the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Year award at the Digital Health Awards 2021.
The CIPHA programme was initially funded through NHSX to support the Partnership in developing a population health platform, to manage the COVID crisis and drive COVID recovery. To achieve this, the programme team worked closely with Graphnet, to rapidly implement (within a remarkable 90 day period) a population health management platform called CIPHA, that helped to ensure a steady flow of securely stored real-time data feeds from all local NHS and Social Care providers and national data sets to deliver consistent, coherent and actionable dashboards across the region.
Data sharing that has made a real difference, as it helped to support the Liverpool mass testing pilot that informed UK Government policy, and it was also utilised to help the national Events Research Programme in building a Covid safety-net, to allow events to reopen across the UK. In fact, due to the programme’s success within the first year it was funded, NHSX have since funded a CIPHA expansion programme based on the CIPHA blueprint (with a population coverage of circa 17 million), and the programme as a whole is now not just helping to inform population-level planning and the targeting of direct care interventions solely within Cheshire and Merseyside, but across the whole country.
In addition to the success of our CIPHA programme, our former Digital Lead Paul Charnley has also been recognised for the measurable impact he’s made throughout his career, which he’s dedicated to improving patient care through the use of technology. Paul has achieved this by working at local, regional and national levels on largescale healthcare programmes, in the UK, Qatar and USA, where he’s demonstrated the benefits of advanced digitization and local population health management. From delivering national platforms including the NHS Spine and Summary Care Record, procuring an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system, and leading a Global Digital Exemplar programme. To more recently, directing the Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership’s digital programme which under his leadership has gone from strength to strength.
Most notably, during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw the rapid rollout of a range of digital innovations that were instrumental in supporting Cheshire and Merseyside’s response to the COVID pandemic. This included the swift implementation of CIPHA (as mentioned above), and furthering the adoption of our region’s health information sharing platform Share2Care, which helped to aid clinicians in the daily delivery of safer and more effective care to patients, at a time when services where particularly stretched due to the rise in COVID admissions. Paul is now semi-retired, but he continues to support the Partnership, working part-time in the Wirral, where he lives.
Speaking of the Digital Programmes double success, newly appointed Chief Digital Information Officer (CDIO) for the Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership, Alex Chaplin commented: “On behalf of the Digital Programme team, I’d like to extend my congratulations to the CIPHA programme team and to Paul, as they’re both worthy winners and deserve to be recognised for the remarkable achievements they’ve accomplished. They have without a doubt helped to lay substantial foundations on which we as a Digital Programme can continue to build on, and I hope that these mark the first of many accomplishments for us, as we strive towards ‘Making a Difference through Digital’, not just across the Cheshire and Merseyside footprint, but also within the nine individual local authority areas or ‘Places’ it’s made up of. With the ultimate goal of our Digital Programme becoming a nationally recognised integrated care system (ICS) exemplar.”
The 2021 HTN Awards ceremony was held on 7th October, and the awards help to share and celebrate digital teams, programmes, innovations and suppliers that have made a measurable difference to care and services. You can find out more about the other 2021 HTN award winners, which include Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and Cheshire East Council, by clicking here.
The 2021 Digital Health Awards ceremony was also held on 7th October, and the awards recognise and celebrate the achievements of the leaders making the biggest contributions to UK healthcare IT. You can find out more about the other 2021 Digital Health Award winners, by clicking here.