NHSX has opened a market engagement exercise to gather information to investigate the current market capabilities and possible solutions to shape booking and referral appointment management.
Relevant suppliers are being invited to participate through a questionnaire, as part of the NHSX Booking Referrals Appointment Management (BRAM) programme. The main aim of the project is “to understand the availability of solutions that can support the electronic connection of services via booking, referral, and triage, from any point of referral to any service, agnostic of care setting.”
The information gathering exercise is to be used to develop the organisation’s strategy in this area, to understand solutions in the market and the future capabilities, including:
- End-to-end timeline of patient
- Integrated decision support
- Any-to-any service finder
- Universal booking system
- Relevant clinical data finder
- Referral builder
- Data updater
- Booking viewing and editing
- Next steps workflow manager.
In May 2019, a strategic review of the electronic-Referral Service (e-RS) was conducted by the Infrastructure Projects Authority, recommending “it [e-RS] should continue to be developed and transformed to incorporate Bookings, Referrals and Appointment Management (BRAM), across the full span of health and social care services.”
The National Commercial and Procurement Hub is now conducting the market engagement on behalf of NHSX, via the Intend e-procurement system. The deadline for completing the questionnaire is 8 September 2021.
Last week, HTN reported on the recent improvements to e-RS and shared the future road-map of the platform. Four priorities, as well as the expected development stages and next steps, were highlighted and included the ability for e-RS and other systems to ‘talk’ to each other, support for referral reporting, and changes to work-lists for managing patient referrals.
Plans also include to make e-RS available to a wider range of health and care settings, and to continue with technical changes to ensure the system is future-proof.
