Market Intelligence
Digital Leadership Programme - Skills for Care and The National Care Forum
March 2023
The newly refreshed Digital Leadership Programme, a four day programme delivered digitally by The National Care Forum and Skills for Care is designed specifically for registered managers working in social care.
Further information can be found at the following link: https://www.nationalcareforum.org.uk/projects/digital-leadership-course/
CQC awarded funding to encourage innovation
March 2023
Through the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund, the Care Quality Commission has recently been awarded £118,004 of funding to explore and pilot ways of developing the right regulatory environment for innovation to flourish.
GP Connect - Data sharing in a care setting
February 2023
Please find below an article and supporting guidance from Digital Social Care on GP Connect which we believe will be of interest to our members:
Article: https://www.digitalsocialcare.co.uk/gp-connect-data-sharing-in-a-care-setting/
NIHR research funding opportunity in digital technologies for social care
February 2023
Lessons learnt from Advanced Cyber attack
November 2022
On the 6th August 2022, Advanced Health and Care declared that they had a cyber attack on their Social Care products, which extended to their Health products.
Lessons learnt
Without going into the details of the cause of the cyber attack, the following four issues have been learnt that CASPA believes are suitable for all software providers to social care to follow.
1. All technology in use by any product must be fully supported and patched against all known vulnerabilities. Fully cloud based IaaS providers provide this by default – but is not the only solution, but if not cloud based then the processes need to be in place to ensure the infrastructure is fully maintained.
2. There needs to be a fully tested, documented and audited disaster recovery plan with infrastructure that can be built from scratch and backups that are segregated from the production systems to ensure that any attack on the production systems can not leak to the backups.
3. Where a company supplies multiple products, each product should be on fully segregated infrastructure so that there can be no opportunity for an attack to leak from one product to any other.
4. Technology suppliers need to retain third party services to attempt penetration at regular intervals – penetration testing will give assurance that systems have been tested and are up-to-date with most recent patches that resolve known vulnerabilities. Third party penetration testing should be undertaken at least annually due to the rapidly changing technology in the modern world.
The Department of Health Social Care announces new social care minister - Helen Whately
The Department of Health Social Care has announced the responsibilities of its new ministerial team and has confirmed the person responsible for overseeing the social care sector.
The new social care minister, Helen Whately, was the secretary of state for Social Care in 2020.
GK, CASPA’s newly appointed Public Affairs partner, have put together a short biography of the new minister, which you can download below.
Invitation to The IT Supplier Forum
You are invited to the first Department of Health and Social Care forum for IT suppliers to the Adult Social Care sector.
The forum will be held virtually on Wednesday, the 7th of December 2022, from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm.
Teams presenting from within DHSC include:
Charging Reform
Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS)
Client Level Data (CLD)
Digitising Social Care (DiSC)
Adult Social Care Terminology
Please pass this on to any other interested parties and through your networks.
The forum will be an opportunity for programmes and projects across the department to set out their latest updates, and for IT suppliers to ask questions of those involved, as well as an opportunity to draw together workstreams across the social care IT sector. We want to maintain strong working relationships with the ASC supplier market and hope this forum will enable collaboration, and support and shape the way we work in the future.
MEETING ACCESS DETAILS
Mircosoft Teams – click here to join the meeting.
Meeting ID: 320 339 415 926
Passcode: VTWQqB
Join with a video conferencing device: Video Conference ID: 122 351 802 8
Or call in: Phone Conference ID: 276 075 328#
Data Protection and Digital Information Bill
NHS England has asked CASPA to share the attached slides regarding a Department of Culture Media and Sports’ Bill on Information Standards for Health and Adult Social Care.
The full Bill and supporting documents can be found here.
CASPA has significant concerns about this Bill and the impact on the social care software market. The Bill gives wide-ranging powers to public authorities to enforce adherence to standard frameworks, including functional requirements such as how the software works. It goes well beyond what is necessary to enable interoperability between health and social care.
For context, the provisions have been added to the Bill as a result of issues the NHS has with large software providers, who they have had difficult relationships with, in meeting development of their needs. This is not relevant to the social care market and risks misuse, is likely to be unenforceable, whilst causing unnecessary market disruption.
NHS England is calling for use cases in support of the Bill. Instead, we strongly recommend that CASPA members respond to the call for evidence to express their concern over the Bill and its potential impact on the social care software market. Please submit your views to: england.futurevision@nhs.net.
Chancellor announces Autumn Statement - 17th November 2022
Please find below a memo prepared by GK, CASPA’s newly appointed Public Affairs partner that we believe will be of interest to our members:
NHS Transformation Directorate Interoperability; request for evidence
We would like to recognise the effort and hard work many people put in to improve interoperability across the NHS & Care ecosystem. Much has been achieved that we should recognise, equally much remains to be done. In order to help with this continued effort we are reaching out widely across this community of interest ecosystem for your help.
The NHS Transformation Directorate would like to request your support with the following:
- Crowdsourcing Existing Use Cases (especially on interoperability, integration, data architecture issues and blockers in patient pathways that involve several care settings). We welcome your use cases and please send it to frontline.digitisation@nhs.net. Please do not write a new use case but send us your existing work. There is no form or template to complete. A set of slides are attached with further information.
- Survey on blockers to standard adoption (to identify quantitative evidence and a prioritised list of blockers to adoption which will be used to develop further policy and measures for boosting standards adoption).This is the link to the survey and it will take approximately 15 minutes to complete. We ask that you cascade these to your member, or constituent bodies and network, as well as providing a response. If you have further questions, please contact interop.standards@nhsx.nhs.uk with “Blockers Survey” in the subject line. Further information is attached.
This is an opportunity for us to gain your insight into the issues and blockers to open data architecture, data liquidity and data interoperability, and will be extremely beneficial in the planning of future national health and social care strategy. Results will also be used to inform current EPR strategies, and to improve levels of interoperability across the NHS through the development and adoption of standard.
We commit to feeding back the outputs & learning from this collection so you can see how we are using this to help shape future approaches.
Many thanks again for your help
Sonia Patel
Dave Turner
Luke Readman
NHS Transformation (NHST) Upcoming Funding Reform Plans
CASPA has engaged with the NHS Transformation (NHST) team responsible for establishing the technological requirements for the upcoming funding reform plans. As a result, NHST has identified a need to learn more about the current software used by care providers which could support their work and may offer future opportunities for their programmes. This offers a great opportunity for CASPA to demonstrate the capability of social care software to ensure we are given due consideration in service design.
Mason Advisory is assisting NHST in the discovery phase of planning and would like to conduct interviews with a broad range of CASPA members who have invoicing functionality in their software. If you would like to partake in the interviews, please email as follows:
TO: Lizzie.Colden@masonadvisory.com,
CC: ellie.deroy-associate@masonadvisory.com, loice.mugwagwa@masonadvisory.com
SUBJECT: CASPA Member Interview [COMPANY NAME]
Mason Advisory has also been provided with the CASPA Membership list so they may also reach out to you directly.
NHST has also agreed to regular updates with CASPA on their plans for funding reform which we will keep members informed of.