The Digital Healthcare Community

This module is designed to give students a critical understanding of digital transformation in healthcare communities and how Information Communication Technology will be critical to ensure safe sustainable and quality healthcare in the context of a growing and ageing population.   Initially, the module examines the sociological relationship between the patient/client and the healthcare provider and the transformation and change of that relationship through the growing introduction of technology/software. Digital society, social media, digital citizenship, research, and evaluative enquiry are further explored.

The module then explores digital transformation projects and the digital community lifecycle. Key factors for successful digital implementations, working on shared digital platforms; digital literacy, and collaborative practice. The concepts of digitally integrated care are presented in terms of the current structures of community healthcare, the driving forces for the stay left shift left policy approach, the driving forces and key requirements, barriers and challenges for digitally enabled and enhanced care delivery and the state of digital maturity in the community healthcare setting. The module goes on to investigate ethical, legal, quality, safety and risk issues for digital healthcare communities including health information autonomy, GDPR, patient safety considerations, public patient involvement, risk management, human factors and implementation/improvement science.  

1. Demonstrate a critical knowledge of digital media and society and the evolving relationship between patient/client and healthcare provider through the growing introduction of technology and software. 

2. Distinguish the various components of the digital community lifecycle and the varied approaches used to implement and evaluate systems.

3. Using detailed clinical workflows and process mapping, examine and analyse patient and healthcare provider user requirements to enable and enhance integrated digital capabilities

4. Critically examine clinical information capture in the community EHR, nursing and HSCP documentation requirements; coding, naming conventions, standardised language/terminologies, and clinical data types

5. Interpret the Ethical and Legal Issues for digital healthcare communities and the concept of Health Information Autonomy

6. Formulate core components of Quality, Safety and Risk Management in the digital healthcare community and critically examine patient and public partnerships & involvement.