Charting complex change in DALLAS: application of the e-health implementation toolkit (e-HIT)

The ‘dallas’ (Delivering Assisted Living Lifestyles at Scale) programme is a UK-wide digital healthcare initiative that has been designed to support independent living, enhance preventative care, and improve lifestyles by harnessing the potential of e-health technologies and digital services. This short paper presents a brief update on one strand of the University of Glasgow evaluation of the dallas programme. We have used the e-Health Implementation Toolkit (e-HIT) to investigate processes involved in the implementation of e-health tools and digital services being developed and deployed across the dallas communities and to assess ‘distance travelled’ by communities from baseline to midpoint of a three year programme. Qualitative data analysis was guided by the Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) and Framework Analysis. The e-HIT scores indicated that the dallas communities had underestimated the amount of work involved in implementing at scale. Qualitative data analysis showed that communities have successfully navigated barriers in order to make significant progress in strategic areas, including the development of new models of partnership working resulting in brand recognition and agile service design. The dallas communities are now sharing lessons learned and generating new professional knowledge, skills and understanding across several key strategic areas required for operationalising the implementation of e-health technologies and digital services at scale. The new knowledge being generated through the dallas programme will contribute to the ongoing transformation of digitally enabled healthcare based on more personalised flexible models of provision which resonates with the current e-health policy environment.