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Implementation services

Our approach to deploying the Map of Medicine is formulated to get the Map to be 'the way we do things' as quickly as possible. This minimises the resources required to achieve sustained benefits as well as ensuring that deployment is closely aligned to challenges that a health economy is trying to overcome.

In order to achieve this, it is critical that any deployment is grounded in addressing specific challenges. Map of Medicine deployments cover a Local Health Community (LHC). Each LHC should be a patient centric view of the healthcare service. For example, in England, this means that it must consist of at least one Primary Care organisation and their provider organisation(s). The LHC should represent the entire end-to-end patient journey through the healthcare system.

Most of the challenges faced by Local Health Communities are complex and inter-related. The Map helps bring together disparate groups from within the LHC and provides a common framework to design patient centric pathways that will help address these challenges.

Local Health Communities have used the Map to address key objectives such as commissioning, 18/26 week Referral to Treatment targets, providing more consistent patient experience or delivering care closer to home.

A Map of Medicine deployment is generally split into 3 phases:

  • Planning
  • Localisation
  • Benefits Realisation

Planning

The objective of the first phase is to create or validate the Local Health Community and the associated programme structure to support care pathway development across all organisations in a Local Health Community.

This phase primarily looks at organisational issues and ensures that the Local Health Community is geared towards a seamless and effective transition from project to operational use of the Map. Typically, we engage with organisations at this stage to:

  • Ensure that senior leaders, managerial and clinical, from all organisations within the Local Health Community are engaged and aware of the Map of Medicine deployment
  • Identify and validate the business challenges that are to be addressed by the Map deployment with the Senior Leadership team
  • Understand the baseline that needs to be moved to show benefit
  • Provide guidance on appropriate governance structures and processes

At the end of this stage, it is normal to do a launch event for the Map in the Local Health Community. This provides an opportunity to introduce the product but also to communicate the longer term aims for the Map deployment to all healthcare staff within the Local Health Community. This stakeholder engagement at this stage is critical to ensure that benefits realisation is effectively managed.

Localisation

Once the local challenges have been identified and validated with the Senior Leadership team, we move into the localisation phase. The key objective of this phase is to ensure that all the skills and knowledge to use the localisation capability of the Map is transferred to the appropriate members of the Local Health Community.

We also work with key stakeholders at this stage to ensure that the Map starts to be integrated with existing projects that may already be underway. For example, Wirral had a number of Service Redesign teams undertaking projects aimed at improving the patient experience and reducing unnecessary costs in a number of key, high volume areas. The Map of Medicine was introduced as an enabling tool to these projects allowing them to communicate changes in care delivery across the health community in a single place.

Localisation projects are typically undertaken in a structured fashion. A Local Health Community may have a series of inter-related projects or a number of discrete projects that can run concurrently. Typically, we find that after three clinical localisation projects, a Local Health Community has all the skills and processes to become self-sufficient use of the Map Management Suite (MMS).

We provide training to named individuals to undertake both clinical and local administrative localisation. As the localisation work progresses, we test that that governance processes from the Planning stage are robust and operational.

At the end of this stage, each localised pathway is launched in the Local Health Community. Communications are focused on the clinical behavioural change that is required to ensure that the new care pathway delivers the promised benefits to both the patient and the Local Health Community. This is possible because the Map of Medicine launch has occurred during the Planning phase and all healthcare professionals are aware of the availability of the Map in their area. Focused communications on the specific pathway are key to driving benefits.

Benefits Realisation

This phase is concerned with ensuring that the outcome expected is being achieved. Baseline data will have been collected as part of the Planning phase. The key objectives and behavioural changes for each care pathway will be been established during the Localisation phase. As healthcare professionals change their approach to healthcare delivery, the outcomes (whether patient centric, organisational or financial) will have to be measured.

This phase is critical to create a 'positive feedback loop' to the Senior Leadership team showing that the whole Healthcare Community has been able to undertake the changes in the way healthcare is delivered and achieved the benefits that were originally envisaged.

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