As one of the largest estates in the UK, with thousands of assets and properties, NHS Scotland is transforming the way it manages data across the 14 territorial Health Boards and eight national Health Boards.  

The initiative brings positive change across the NHS Scotland estate from rural GP surgeries, to state-of-the-art city hospitals. While different in set up, both share the need to manage and access high quality data across the system to allow for quality decision making to be achieved. This, in turn, allows them to operate and achieve targets better, using the data around them to test and monitor their performance. It will also positively impact the environment and improve the patient care and user experience.  

The organisations have collaborated on an interactive toolkit to provide a framework for the design, build and maintenance of NHS Scotland’s built assets. 

Other collaborative work includes a newly published bespoke Digital Twin navigator as part of a series of navigators produced by the Hub to provide a framework for organisations to consider digital twinning into a project. 

The new guide will help inform a clear Digital Twin strategy throughout the lifecycle of a build. The ​Digital Twin strategy will also influence any modelling and wider impacted networks. 

David Philp, impact director for the Construction Innovation Hub, said: “Through engagement with NHS Scotland Assure, we have been helping create a framework and tools to establish the high-level principles, methods and the target technology architecture needed to create a digital and connected estate.

“This work underpins the NHS Scotland drive towards a Digital Estate and an information-led approach through Assurance and Improvement Management Systems (AIMS), their enterprise level common data environment (CDE).” 

Louise Sykes, senior digital estate and asset management advisor for NHS Scotland Assure, part of NHS National Services Scotland, said: “The collaboration with the Construction Innovation Hub has been instrumental in assisting Health Boards with their digital transformation journeys.

“We are now working together on further innovative developments, including a digital estate prioritisation tool. This will be rolled out and implemented as part of an ambition to digitise the Scottish Healthcare built environment at scale.”