Clinical infrastructure specialist Feedback Medical has announced a series of pilot programmes to support community diagnostic centre (CDC) care pathways.
£300k funding will support two pilot projects in Buckinghamshire to explore “multiple service lines and mutual aid delivery models for sharing workforce capacity at a regional basis” through Bleepa, a platform designed to connect medical professionals with the ability to integrate into multiple clinical systems.
One of the pilot programmes will take place at Amersham CDC, whilst the other is a pan-regional pilot running across Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire ICS. They are to run until March 2024 and aim to “demonstrate the impact of a pathway approach on CDC utilisation and wider patient wait times”, with a view to generating evidence to build a case for subsequent funding of a pathway approach to CDC delivery.
Feedback Medical’s CEO Dr Tom Oakley notes that Bleepa has “already demonstrated a 69 percent reduction in wait times through the power of asynchronous communication and a pathway approach” at another site in Sussex (Queen Victoria Hospital).
He continued: “We are delighted to have the opportunity to further build the evidence base for a pathway approach to CDCs using Bleepa. This will generate results back into the clinical pathway, under the noses of decision makers, and enable them to facilitate a robust clinical dialogue to transform results into care decisions.
“This is the sort of impact data that will support the NHS to address elective care backlogs and to help ease winter pressures.”
We previously shared an independent evaluation report exploring Bleepa’s utilisation at Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust, following the trust’s adoption of the tool in 2019 with a view to to tackling delays, lowering the administrative burden of clinical staff and reducing patient length of stay.
We also looked into pathways, cross-organisational workflows and region-wide projects in last year’s special report, available to read here.
In other news from Buckinghamshire, last month we reported on the launch of a new draft primary care strategy, with engagement invited from the public.
