The Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) was commissioned, and continues to be actively involved, in supporting the Scottish Government’s national response to the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic from the first week in March 2020. We have onboarded six new Covid-19 projects over the last five months, which has resulted in DHI re-prioritising our work program and reallocating staff resources to accelerate our pace of working. Our whole team has risen to these challenges and have produced high quality products that are being deployed into a live service, supporting the population of Scotland (patients, service users as well as health and social care staff) at this critical point.

We have established close working relations with all key partners across Scotland, particularly the Digital Directorate, NHS Scotland Digital, NES and TEC functions as well as national and territorial health boards, the Digital Office for Local Government and key third sector and independent sector organisations. Several academic and industry partners have also been engaged to support this work. This includes several Scottish SMEs including Storm ID, Sitekit, Daysix, Tactuum and Cohesion along with Scottish Enterprise.

The DHI team worked virtually and used a variety of interactive, online tools to collaborate and co-design, develop and define solutions and services, collaboratively with stakeholders. Frequently involving up to 30 participants, project workshops were organised and facilitated with technologists, clinicians, designers, NHS staff and representatives from the Government to gather experience-based insight, document requirements and plan for wider integration.

Following the success of this new type of working, we plan on integrating elements of it into all future projects to help fastrack innovation ideation into delivery.