An opinion piece by Prof (Hon) David Philp, Impact Director, Construction Innovation Hub

Digitalisation and more effective handling of data is at the heart of the Hub’s work to transform construction and the built environment. That’s why we are working with NHS Scotland to accelerate the digitisation of Scotland’s healthcare estate.

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 Hub has 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.
By engaging 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). The project highlights the importance of collaboration and shows that the uptake of our key themes of value, digital, assurance and manufacture we can make a positive impact on our built environment and wider society.