NHS endorsement for Personal Health Budgets

PPL is delighted to be named in a recent NHS England report as a provider of high quality IT systems that meet its requirements for integrated personalised commissioning and personal health budgets.

We are one of only a few suppliers that received such recognition, and one of only three nationally that met NHS England’s standards in the area of community.

The report was the result of a national engagement exercise with IT suppliers to evaluate the solutions available and suppliers’ readiness for supporting the expansion of personal health budgets. The purpose of ‘IT Challenge for Personalised Care’ was to:

• assess the quality and extent of existing systems
• support clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) and their partners in developing specifications that meet their local circumstances
• stimulate a dynamic IT supplier marketplace, encouraging innovation and new entrants.

In the report, NHS England stresses that effective IT solutions are needed to help the NHS meet the target of 100,000 personal health budgets by March 2021.

A number of compulsory core requirements were specified which including co-production, support for different budget models, data security, interoperability and data analysis.as well as additional requirements under five functional areas.

We have been assessed both independently and with its partner – Servelec HSC. As a combined solution with Servelec HSC, we are the only supplier to meet all four additional requirement areas of identification, management and monitoring, marketplace and community and was assessed as being expected to meet the requirements for planning soon. Independently, we also met requirements for management and monitoring, marketplace and community.

A particular area of note from NHS England was the importance of co-production with people with lived experience and the report cites this as an area of improvement for suppliers. However we were pleased to gain positive feedback from NHS England for its commitment to a genuine approach to working with people with lived experience to develop its solutions

The published report can be accessed here. The intention of the report is to support and encourage CCGs to procure and implement IT solutions that include the requirements for personalised care. This report also sets out six actions for CCGs to take to implement more effective IT systems in local areas.

You can find out more about PPL's solutions for personal health budgets here.