Supercharging NHS secure data collaboration with ambitions of reaching 600,000 users by 2025.
Member Agile Elephant has launched an updated checkpoint report for the growth and expansion of NHS England’s FutureNHS (FNHS), a secure collaboration platform open to everyone working in health and care. Today, NHS England makes Agile Elephant’s Executive Summary available at future.nhs.uk/AgileElephantReport.
Since its inception in 2017, FutureNHS has become both a Tech For Good and NHS success story, enabled, scaled, and supported by cloud technology. It is used to help people easily connect, share, and learn across boundaries and has grown dramatically in terms of user numbers, impact, and value.
In 2017 the platform had 5,000 members and 100 workspaces. By September 2023 it had grown to 310,000 members and 4,000 workspaces, with 9,000 new members coming on board each month. The ambition is to continue this growth trajectory and reach 600,000 by 2025.
Working in partnership with consultancy firm Agile Elephant and hosted and supported by software provider Kahootz, the platform has been instrumental in accelerating improvement and innovation, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
FNHS was created in support of the NHS Five Year Forward View with its shared vision based around the new models of care across organisations and geographies. The platform is open to commissioners, providers, senior management, front line staff, clinicians, health and social care colleagues, voluntary and community sector organisations, and commercial sector organisations working in the sector.
The range and impact of the way the platform is being used is varied and impressive:
- The Outpatient Recovery and Transformation Platform to help embed new ways of working across outpatient services by sharing specialised resources, support peer conversations via the discussion forum and help the national team understand and respond to current hot topics at the frontline.
- The National Digital Nursing Programme to co-create vital clinical documents.
- The Greener NHS Knowledge Hub to learn, share ideas, challenges, and form plans across Trusts to reach net zero carbon.
- The Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) Forum to pull together vital data and information for urgent and emergency care.
- A Homelessness and Health Inclusion group enabling people from a range of organisations to come together rapidly, share knowledge and collaborate during the COVID-19 pandemic to help move the homeless off the streets into accommodation.
- A Population Health Academy group collaborating to help integrated care systems understand and predict future health and care needs and reduce health inequalities.
- A GP-super partnership using the platform as their core day-to-day collaboration tool across a multi-site GP practice.
- AnalystX, a workspace started a few days before lockdown to solve COVID related problems, that has grown to become a vital meeting place connecting and empowering the data and analytics community.
Alice Montgomery-Reed, Head of FutureNHS at NHS England, said “The platform has been a vital tool in supporting teams across the system with the response to the pandemic and now into recovery; building collective knowledge, innovation and creativity.”
David Terrar, who is both CEO of Cloud Industry Forum, and Founder and CXO of Agile Elephant said “FutureNHS is a real success story, connecting hundreds of thousands of dedicated professionals across the entire NHS health and care ecosystem to help them solve problems, reduce waste, and provide better outcomes and care – it should be applauded as one of the largest collaboration communities of its kind. Agile Elephant is proud to have been involved since 2017, and Cloud Industry Forum is delighted to play their part as Strategic Partner for the AnalystX community within FNHS.”
John Glover, Kahootz Sales & Marketing Director, said: “With the partnership renewed and our sights set on the goal of 600,000 users by 2025, we are gearing up to support the FutureNHS team in their efforts to facilitate seamless collaboration and sharing best practices across the health and care ecosystem.”
