Feedback Medical Limited is pleased to announce that we have entered into a memorandum of understanding to embark on a pilot scheme to provide community diagnostic centre (CDC) services with the Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (QVH) on behalf of the Sussex Integrated Care System (Sussex ICS) as one of the UK’s CDC exemplar sites.
Community diagnostic centre programme
The CDC programme is a £10bn programme designed to help reduce the elective care backlog facing the NHS by bringing diagnostic investigations closer to patients in community settings. The programme is aimed at reducing the need for patients to attend hospital for diagnostic tests, enabling hospital facilities to be better utilised to manage inpatient and emergency services. CDCs will provide a range of diagnostic investigations including medical imaging, blood tests, ECGs and eventually endoscopy services.
Piloting Bleepa and CareLocker
The pilot will use Feedback Medical’s digital infrastructure, which includes Bleepa and CareLocker, with the intention to identify the specification for bespoke development to meet the core CDC system needs of Sussex ICS. Feedback Medical’s primary product, Bleepa, provides a digital clinical communication platform to allow these investigations to be captured, associated with a specific patient journey and presented to clinicians in both primary and secondary care settings for review, discussion and planning onward management. The pathway record will then be stored centrally using Feedback Medical’s patient-specific CareLocker infrastructure to ensure its onward availability to all care settings.
The pilot is expected to run until March 2022 and will initially focus on delivering targeted CDC pathways in specific clinical areas such as respiratory and cardiology. It is anticipated that more pathways will be added as the pilot progresses with the ultimate aim of agreeing contractual terms for a commercial roll-out to CDCs.
Creating a blueprint for CDC delivery
As one of the first CDC sites to be launched in the UK, this pilot is expected to act as a blueprint model for how CDCs can be delivered. For CDCs to deliver their potential in streamlining patient journeys, accelerating investigation and decision making, it is essential that CDCs are connected to primary and secondary care settings and have the right digital infrastructure to present diagnostic information to these settings whilst facilitating cross-site communication. Feedback Medical is uniquely placed to deliver this digital infrastructure through Bleepa and CareLocker combined given the products’ abilities to share and store medical data and facilitate patient-specific case discussion across provider settings.
“The CDC programme sees the creation of an entirely new care setting and it needs the right digital infrastructure to ensure that it is fully integrated in order to deliver the intended system benefits and to drive down the elective care backlog. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redesign care pathways and service delivery to our citizens. We are delighted to be working with such an innovative team across QVH and the wider Sussex ICS and are proud that Bleepa will feature in one of the showcases of the CDC programme.
“Connecting teams across care settings and presenting clinical data to drive faster decision making is precisely what Bleepa is designed to deliver. The CDC programme is an exciting opportunity for us to demonstrate our technology at a regional level and we believe that this will lead to a number of broader opportunities for Bleepa and our supporting technologies within the CDC programme and beyond.”
Dr Tom Oakley, CEO, Feedback Medical Limited
“We are very pleased to be working with Feedback Medical and believe that the Bleepa platform will enable us to deliver cross-regional care aligned to designated clinical pathways. The patient-centric approach is core to our CDC proposal and the combination of Bleepa and CareLocker will allow us to deliver a connected CDC programme that maximises the impact for staff, patients and the wider system.”
Dr Ian Francis, Deputy Medical Director, Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
