DH Care Networks Telecare – Information requests for telecare and telehealth

Nick Goodwin and I (Mike Clark) are currently working on a number of briefing papers as part of the Whole System Demonstrator Action Network in England.

The Network is responsible for disseminating the learning from the Whole System Demonstrator Programme (WSD) in Kent, Cornwall and Newham. The WSD programme is thought to be the largest randomised controlled trial of telecare and telehealth ever undertaken within an integrated health and social care setting.

The briefing papers will be published over the coming months as part of the developing evidence base and will include major reviews of the literature. This work is being completed in conjunction with the WSD evaluation team.

The briefing papers will include examples of innovation and good practice as well as case studies from the programme and from around the world.

We recently issued an information request covering quantitative studies around carers and telecare/telehealth and have been very pleased with the response.

We are now looking for documented examples of product and service innovation (including how barriers and challenges have been overcome), service commissioning, integrated and partnership working, interoperability, business and strategic planning for working at scale as well as the involvement of users and patients in the design of products and services.

We are particularly interested in examples where there has been an independent evaluation of a programme as we are updating our national project and evaluation listings for future publication. If you have an audit or independent evaluation either completed or underway, we would be very interested to hear from you.

If you are able to respond to this information request then please send your contributions to Mike Clark at telecare@dhcarenetworks.org.uk. We look forward to hearing from you by 31 March 2010.

Many thanks

Mike Clark