Definition Health’s perioperative digital surgical solution is a market leading, best in class, cloud-based platform, that improves the patient journey in numerous ways, realising savings and efficiencies for the healthcare provider, whether at an NHS Trust or across an ICS.

Founded in 2018 by two NHS consultants, our solutions, including LifeBox, Connect and Recovery Virtual Ward, are now being utilised in more than 35 hospitals nationwide, across 10 NHS Trusts and numerous private hospitals, enabling the care of over 175,000 patients through a digital pre-operative pathway, including over 350,000 digital files securely shared with patients. Through this digital journey, efficiency is improved, cost reduction enabled and patient education improved – all contributing to overall improved outcomes for patients.

It is our strong belief that all medicine should be evidence-based, to allow hospital staff to rapidly adopt proven solutions with confidence.

A recent independent study by Unity Insights, in collaboration with Health Innovation Kent Surrey and Sussex, demonstrated our multifaceted success. Working in partnership, Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust and Definition Health deployed LifeBox to deliver an end-to-end digital surgical pathway and make a significant impact above and beyond the previous digital solution.

The major successes for the Trust (per 12,000 patients over 5 years) were as follows:

• Non-Cash releasing savings of £433k
• Cash releasing savings of £132k
• 103 tCO2e saved in travel
• 5 tCO2e in paper
• Return of £1.40 for every £1 invested; an ROI of 40%

These findings were extrapolated out to the Surrey Heartlands ICS by the Unity Insights team, with some highly encouraging figures for any ICS looking to revolutionise their pre-op pathway towards a Digital Future in 2024 and beyond:

• Ability to save £1.94 million per 43,000 patients over 5 years
• Return of £1.50 for every £1 invested; an ROI of 50%.

By engaging and optimising patients as early on in their surgical journey as possible, and by closely monitoring them post-discharge in our Recovery Virtual Ward (crucially, all through the same login), we are able to provide healthcare providers with the opportunity to increase quality of care whilst unlocking efficiencies in their surgical pathway.

Patients are automatically prompted to complete a specialty-specific weekly diary, which tracks their post-op pain, and allows upload of wound pictures and gait videos, as appropriate. These responses are then given an RAG status, which flags only those patients who require intervention, on a hospital dashboard. This allows hospitals to do away with the traditional 48-hour post-discharge phone call, and enables any issues to be dealt with more quickly, before they become serious. In a pilot study at SWLEOC, they used this with hip replacement patients to inform how patients are followed-up at 6 weeks. Of the 120 patients who went through the pilot, only 17 (14.2%) needed follow-up by a consultant surgeon, therefore creating huge time and resource efficiencies.

Learn more at definitionhealth.co.uk