Outline Business Case for Digital Maternity Care

Digital Health & Care Wales (DHCW) commissioned In-Form Solutions to prepare an Outline Business Case (OBC) for a new Digital Maternity System that could be used by all health boards in Wales. The programme is known as Digital Maternity Cymru (DMC) and the business case process adopts the HM Treasury five case business model. A Digital Maternity System is a paperless maternity record that manages the whole pathway for pregnancy care. Multi-disciplinary clinicians throughout Wales as well as women and birthing people can access digital health records, promoting safer care and reducing risks through accessible digital records. In addition, the system promotes collection of improved management data for operational resource planning and benchmarking to improve maternity services through better governance.

This assignment involved a small multi-disciplinary team from In-Form Solutions to complete this work within a short timescale. A joint operational board was assembled with DHCW which met weekly to ensure progress was maintained and issues resolved. The assignment required strategic analysis, stakeholder interviews, an extensive amount of external research, project planning, analysis, costing, financial modelling and report development. The OBC was successfully concluded and presented to the Executive Group for approval. 

Our Work included:

• Undertaking a scoping review to ensure resources were focused in the key areas.
• Project planning and managing the completion of the OBC. 
• Working closely with the DHCW team including clinicians to formulate the report.
• Stratifying and collating individuals plans to help to formulate the OBC.
• Writing up each section of the OBC, i.e. Strategic Case, Economic Case, Commercial Case, Financial Case and Management Case as well as an Executive Summary and Conclusions.
• Detailed costing and financial modelling to support option appraisal.
• Delivering and presenting the OBC to gain stakeholder approval.
• On-going management support.

The key output was the facilitation, development, and completion of the OBC to time, budget and quality. The outcome was an approved OBC which enables the next steps (procurement and implementation planning) to begin in earnest.

“The In-Form team were on hand to help shape and deliver this piece of work on time. The financial and economic input was incredibly helpful given the specific focus for the work and we would work with the team again if given the opportunity and would recommend to others. We considered In-Form Solutions good value, going above and beyond.” Jon Pinkney Digital Health & Care Wales.