NHS SLaM
            

The South London and Maudsley (SLAM) NHS Foundation Trust provides the widest range of mental health and drug and alcohol addiction services in the UK. Its staff serves a local population of over 1.3 million people, providing 260 services. SLaM is part of an academic science center partnering with Kings College London, and the only mental health trust in the UK with its own biomedical research center.

The South London and Maudsley (SLaM) NHS Foundation Trust is widely considered one of the top mental health institutions in the world. In 2021, the Trust wanted to harness technology better to improve the lives of the people who rely on it most. Being a government organization with private partnerships, such as one with Kings College London, SLaM faced unique challenges that went to the core of its business and enterprise architectures.

“We had new interest and requirements to work from home because of the global COVID pandemic,” says Milos Kresojevic, the Senior Innovation Architect at NHS SLaM who oversees the project. “So we had to be extremely agile in developing new applications to support this while providing the same level of support. To do this, our solution developers needed better architectural guidance—quickly.”

The SLaM team reached out to Bruhati—local partners in enterprise architecture and design thinking. Bruhati captured and generated documentation of NHS SLaM’s e-prescription system in Alfabet to demonstrate how high-level solutions can be quickly designed with the information held in the product’s repository. The concept beat every other vendor by a distance. In production, that success started with a fast, 8-week implementation of a highly automated enterprise architecture tool. Kresojevic’s team, which used to rely primarily on Microsoft® Word docs to manage design projects, —now achieves all the same things and more with the Alfabet-based solution Bruhati created for NHS SLaM.

One click in the tool’s interface creates a high-level solution design from the business strategy to the IT project, including all the related, relevant architecture elements: business capability, business process, applications and technologies. This is made even more powerful with a centralized dashboard providing access to the business, data, application, technology, and project portfolios for a complete understanding of how SLaM’s IT landscape is changing.

Now, SLaM can focus on its strategic vision for how the organization can transform itself by 2026. “How do we scale mental health services? That’s a big problem!” says Kresojevic, “How can technology help us provide better mental health services?”

One example is how SLaM is taking on government compliance across a broad range of areas, from clinical studies to the digital storage and security of information. By building in compliance directly from project inception, SLaM achieves direct savings to the bottom line—and countless intangible benefits to its reputation and user trust.

Smart medicine through IoT

No wonder SLaM is moving beyond enterprise architecture and looking to other ways it can enhance operational efficiency and transform the patient experience. Recently, the Trust began to work with Bruhati on a centralized IoT platform based on Cumulocity IoT. One of its first projects is monitoring temperature and air quality sensors in 150 rooms, and 250 fridges used for medicine and other supplies in real time.

“That hugely beats the status quo of someone checking a fridge multiple times a day,” says Kresojevic. “To get buy-in on such projects, we require a return on investment in three to six months, so this is more than just cool tech.”

The platform has automated incident creation, implemented predictive maintenance and alerts, and reduced refrigerated product losses. More importantly, it’s opened new avenues for better patient outcomes with use cases covering air quality, security, and asset tracking via wireless technology. SLaM has made Bruhati their strategic partner for testing wireless tech for more solutions provided to other NHS trusts. Alfabet will be useful here in finding further uses for Cumulocity IoT.

All of this has helped SLaM break from the stereotype that government work is slow. In the area of mental health, innovation isn’t just the business of startups.