SidM-Health : Social Infrastructure Demand Management : focus primary care healthcare planning

Planning for healthcare infrastructure and service provision in the context of uncertainty, housing intensification and growth is complex.Under the NHS Long Term plan the government is investing £4.5bn towards primary care provision and transformation. Hence the need for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to work closely with local authorities Public Health and Planning bodies, to provide joint up patient-led and place-based healthcare planning, has never been greater.

The current processes of healthcare service planning at the local level are time consuming, require data collation from multiple sources and lack methods that translate population growth to direct impact on neighbourhoods and services. This limits the ability of organisations to undertake a proactive, iterative and robust approach towards planning and commissioning of health care services for their local areas. On the other hand, the opportunity to acquire appropriate Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) contributions from new housing development towards healthcare infrastructure, could be exploited further.

The solution is proposed through our digital platform SidM Systems. The platform was awarded grant funding by Future Cities Catapult as UK's top eight PlanTech product concepts designed for place-based social infrastructure planning.

SidM Health, an extension of SidM Systems, will support the cyclical stages of planning of healthcare through spatial and predictive analytics of population, housing and health data under one cloud-based platform. Its key area of innovation includes data driven spatial methodologies that are patient-led, and neighbourhood (place)-based as against traditional boundary-based approaches to health care service planning.

The project will cover the following stages:

identifying the type of spatial growth in population and upcoming new housing,
predicting the direct impact of population change at the level of individual services and neighbourhoods, based on patient trends and housing applications data
produce iterative spatial evidence base towards local and strategic health needs assessments to support commissioning of local services.
refine and integrate the existing NHS supported HUDU model with SidM-Health to provide an assessment of cost implications and space provision required for healthcare due to new housing.
The project will focus on primary care provision. The framework will be built to accommodate scalability to other forms of healthcare including secondary healthcare and pharmacies.

Overall, the project aims to secure cost savings, effectiveness and efficiencies through robust needs assessments, maximise opportunities to benefit from CIL contributions from new housing and support CCGs and local authorities towards optimising patient-led planning of estates and services.