Mills & Reeve Trailblazing Tech – What We Learnt

 Cyber security: how to keep you and your organisation safe

Mills & Reeve Commercial Partner Paul Knight looked at how to establish in the online world that someone is actually who they say they are.

Digital identity verification speeds up the process – from the consumer perspective it provides a smoother onboarding experience and aligns to the expectation that you can sign up for a product or service quickly and start using it immediately. At its heart, digital identity verification can be a powerful tool in the war against cyber criminals. Organisations can benefit from digital identity verification as it reduces human error, you get an improved audit trail and there are cost efficiencies as digital identity verification could reduce the need for other resources required for manual identity verification.

Mills & Reeve have been working with the British Council on its procurement of a technology solution to support the digital identity verification of people who sit English exams offered by them around the world. We’ve also been working with the Money and Pensions Service to implement the national Pensions Dashboards Programme.  Once up and running, that will mean that any of us will be able to view online all our pension information, collated from different pension providers, on one dashboard.  Verifying the identity of someone requesting pension information is of paramount importance, to guard against criminals getting access to pensions information…  which, as Capita knows from the recent cyber security incident it has suffered from, can be of interest to cyber criminals.

Clearly now is not the time for complacency but time for heightened readiness and to review and strengthen your preventative measures.

Download our Cyber security report Defensive Lines in which we uncover themes, trends and events across the cyber threat landscape: https://www.mills-reeve.com/insights/foresight/cyber-preparation-and-response

HealthTech: Virtual wards

Charlotte Lewis, Principal Associate at Mills & Reeve and chair of pro-manchester’s healthcare committee interviewed Dr Saif Ahmed, digital clinical information lead at Health Innovation Manchester on the progress and future plans for virtual wards in Greater Manchester.

A relatively new concept in healthcare, virtual wards are considered to be a safe and efficient alternative to NHS bedded care that is enabled by technology. Virtual wards support patients who would otherwise be in hospital to receive the acute care, monitoring and treatment they need in their own home. This includes either preventing avoidable admissions into hospital or supporting early discharge out of hospital. Essentially, a virtual ward is a system that allows healthcare providers to monitor and care for patients remotely, using tools such as video conferencing, wearable devices, and patient portals.

It is hoped that virtual wards will go some way to tackle the NHS workforce crisis, as highlighted in the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan. But virtual wards are not just about efficiencies, Dr Ahmed revealed the debilitating effect on patients of being sedentary in a hospital bed rather than more mobile in their own homes.

As of March 2023, Greater Manchester providers reported delivery of 467 virtual ward beds, supporting around 400 patients each week. The aim is to deliver approximately 1,095 beds by March 2024.

Virtual wards are not without their challenges and some of these challenges lie within the technology itself, such as issues with different kit functions, skin tone impacting on reading accuracy and the risk of user error if readings are input manually. Dr Ahmed called out to the innovators in the room to help to resolve some of these challenges.

If you’d like to know more about virtual wards please contact Charlotte Lewis on [email protected]