Last week we reached a significant milestone in the Leeds ‘Community Cloud’ programme.
From November 2020 a programme was led at rapid pace to migrate Leeds Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Leeds Community Healthcare (LCH) from their physical server infrastructure based in north Leeds into the Azure Cloud.
The design and implementation of this programme was architected by the Leeds City Digital Partnerships Team, and the Azure environment is now being supported by Leeds City Council’s DIS (Digital Information Service).
The achievement should be especially acknowledged in the current circumstances as many of the teams and colleagues from the CCG and LCH are also working hard on Covid-19 activities; supporting the delivery of the vaccine and keeping essential services running.
The team drove things forward swiftly, leveraging our collective skills in management, infrastructure, networking, security, communication and design.
Alongside our delivery partner (Softcat/UBDS) we were able to undertake the migration in and around the Christmas period. This was a challenging time to deliver the piece of work but also led to minimal impact on our front line services, which was a key requirement for us.
Our CCG supports nearly 100 GP practices across Leeds, and LCH has a workforce of around 3,000 staff, primarily based in the community. To move these two organisations to a cloud-based infrastructure in a matter of weeks, without any serious disruption or downtime (touch wood!) was a really well executed piece of work.
This project has also shown how adaptable we can be in adopting new technologies and gaining new skills and experience.
Having two prominent health and care organisations coming together to work with Leeds City Council and deliver a shared outcome is testament to the city’s ambition and commitment towards partnership working. Now that we have established a cloud presence for both the CCG and LCH, I am confident that this platform provides the flexibility and scale that we will need in the future to support digital transformation across the whole city.
Well done to all IT and Digital staff involved across the organisations and City Digital Partnership.
Introductions...
Whenever I introduce myself and team during meetings it can often be tricky to outline the background, explain exactly where we sit and what our remit covers. There can be assumptions that we work for the organisation which hosts us (Leeds City Council), and I’m hoping this blog post will help to explain some of the wider context.
I am part of the Leeds City Digital Partnerships Team, a small team of IT professionals which has an extensive remit around anything that relates to integrated care in Leeds which is delivered digitally. Basically, if there’s a positive health outcome in joining things up locally, we want to know about it and see where we can help!
We are hosted by Leeds City Council’s Digital Information Service (DIS) and work across the Leeds City Partnership which includes the Council, Leeds CCG and Primary Care, Leeds Community Healthcare, Leeds Teaching Hospital, and Leeds & York Partnership Foundation Trust. These organisations have all agreed to work collaboratively when it comes to IT, digital and many other services, for the benefit of the people of Leeds.
Connecting the Dots....
Our work ranges from shared care records, apps and infrastructure through to commissioning and creating digital solutions to fit clinical and business needs. As Head of Strategy & Solutions, it’s my role to provide leadership and strategy around how we do this; working with our various city stakeholders to help Leeds become the best city for health and wellbeing. For more info, we have documented our city digital ‘commitments'.
Our work is directed by our Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO) Dr Alistair Walling, our Programme Director Alastair Cartwright, and the Chief Digital Information Officer (CDIO) for Leeds CCG & Leeds City Council, Leonardo Tantari.
Joining Things Up Across the City
Our citywide work and digital principles are also embedded with a number of linked initiatives which help to deliver these goals. To name just a few:
The Leeds Care Record, securely combining data from multiple organisations and presenting a shared care record for clinicians and healthcare professionals
Smart Leeds, delivering the vision and platform for Leeds to become a truly smart city
And the amazing 100% Digital Leeds programme, providing support and guidance to help people get online and making Leeds the most digitally inclusive city for everyone.
The Year Ahead...
2020 was undoubtedly the toughest year many of us have faced, not only for the public sector in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, but for everyone in all walks of life. The response to the pandemic highlights the huge advantages of organisations working together and sharing data at a city level, but also the various challenges in doing so – we have so much more to do in this space.
We are in the process of building up some information on our ongoing initiatives (it’s still a work in progress).
There are plenty of projects ‘in flight’ at the moment. To name just a few;
primary to secondary care advice and guidance
digital support for care homes
developing open online platforms for easier sharing of information
developing standards for shared buildings used by local government and NHS
Testing future housing solutions to help people monitor their own health, and the health of the property in which they live
And for good measure... some data centre migrations chucked in there as well!
And... breathe!
So lots to look forward to, which I’m sure will have a great impact on our city partners and more importantly, the people we serve.
Thanks for reading and I really do hope this post finds you well in these trying times.
Rob
We are in the process of refreshing and sharing our “City Digital Principles”. This is an evolution of work completed a few years ago that aimed to consolidate thinking around agreed best practice for city partners.
These principles are directly influenced by goals defined by the Health and Wellbeing Strategy (in particular the priority ‘Maximise the benefits from information and technology’).
We are keen to underline the commitment that partner organisations have to partnership working by agreeing and publishing these principles.
The principles are being refreshed because it was recognised that there has been a shift in ways of working and industry best-practice that needed reflecting. Specifically, we have introduced additional principles from the updated Government Digital Service Standard, TOGAF, Agile methodologies and other sources. The refresh also moves away from being structured in just traditional architecture perspectives (business / application / technology) in order to reflect the overlap between these activities.
It is important to note that these principles are not intended to be an academic exercise. They will form a framework of activity and support from the team in order to:
Support decision-making for digital commissioning
Guide projects to ensure that digital transformation is well-considered, adopted and sustained.
Underpin business cases and support related funding opportunities.