IT Evaluation of Foundation Healthcare Group NHS Vanguard programme: IT simultaneously an enabler and a rate limiting factor.

Lesson learnt is that ensuring patient benefit and priorities is a strong driver to implementation and one needs to identify IT rate-limiting steps at an early stage and on a regular basis and then focus on rapid implementation of solutions. In fact, future work may also assess how the IT infrastructure developed by FHG vanguard project might have helped/boosted the 'digital health' practice during the COVID-19 times. Spreading and scaling-up innovations from the Vanguard sites was the aspiration and challenge for system leaders. After COVID-19, the use of IT is scaled up and now, the challenges in the use of IT are much less compared to the pre-COVID-19 time when this project was evaluated.