Here, we present finalists for the HTN Now Awards 2024 in the category of Digital Patient Transformation.
The Institute of Clinical Science and Technology
Overview: ICST’s Respiratory Digital Therapeutics Toolkit has achieved national adoption across Wales, with a 100 percent uptake in primary care and hospitals. It improves outcomes, builds trust, and sets a precedent for patient-centred digital transformation in healthcare.
Why? Reaching people at scale, achieving widespread adoption, and standardising best practices often proves challenging. While most innovations can demonstrate success in pilot studies, it is said that “pilots rarely fail, but they rarely scale”.
What happened? The ICST Respiratory Toolkit is a co-produced, evidence-based solution that operates across three key layers to support patients, healthcare professionals, and commissioners: patient apps including symptom tracking and medication guidance; a healthcare professional platform offering quality improvement tools, training, and resources; and data reporting for commissioners, empowering them to make evidence-based decisions and evaluate the toolkit’s value at a population level. Designed in partnership with NHS Wales, the Respiratory Toolkit exemplifies ICST’s ability to bridge the gap between policy and practice. It integrates seamlessly into existing pathways, transforming health equity and creating a model for patient-centred, data-driven healthcare. Implemented in 100 percent of primary care practices and 100 percent of hospital trusts across Wales, with no variation by geography or social deprivation. 88 percent of patients were introduced via HCPs, with 90 percent of patients saying that the app helps them manage their condition. Clinical Outcomes include improved RCP wellness scores and reduced blue inhaler use, A&E visits, and unscheduled GP appointments. Outcomes include a 36 percent reduction in GP visits among regular app users; a 19 percent decrease in A&E admissions; improved wellness scores; and an increase in patients not relying on reliever inhalers.
Looking ahead. ICST’s methodology has been replicated internationally, with its COVID recovery toolkit implemented in Hong Kong. This global applicability highlights its potential to address healthcare challenges worldwide.
Insource Limited
Overview: NHSGGC’s Project Team implemented PP+ Cancer Pathway Management in only 7 months. The application provides real time visibility of the full cancer pathway to end users without a requirement to integrate source systems.
Why? NHSGGC’s existing cancer waiting times tracking legacy system was time limited, causing significant challenges for reporting which required manual manipulation to provide retrospective static snapshots. The version of PP+CPM used in NHS Highland, required development to meet NHSGGC requirements.
What happened? NHSGGC’s Project Team successfully delivered the implementation of PP+ Cancer Pathway Management in only 7 months. Powered by the Unified Data Layer (UDL), the application provides real time visibility of the full cancer pathway to end users without a requirement to integrate source systems. Dynamic escalation is unlocked, allowing for timely interventions to deliver shorter waits and help prevent breaches. Staff spend less time obtaining data and producing reports, estimated at 76 hours savings per week. Continuous waiting time visibility, dynamic generation of patient cohorts and real time action tracking delivers role based contextualised information allowing appropriate and timely actions. Early indications demonstrate a significant reduction in the number of patients waiting over 100 days from cancer diagnosis to treatment. The UDL allows for local and national reporting without intervention from other teams or systems, and provides data for secondary uses such as CPD, audit, research and evidencing service improvements.
Looking ahead. Moving forward further data items will be brought into the UDL bringing opportunities for further service improvements. Work continues to enhance functionality and reporting capabilities.
NHS Suffolk and North East Essex ICB
Overview: The CONNECTPlus app empowers women and girls across Suffolk and North East Essex. By enhancing awareness, supporting self-management, and reducing reliance on healthcare professionals, it fosters better health literacy, equitable access to care, and improved wellbeing for women across all life stages.
Why? In 2021, the national Women’s Health Strategy aimed to address significant gaps in women and girls’ access to health information. Only 19 percent of women felt well-informed about menstrual wellbeing. Fewer than 10 percent had adequate information about menopause or gynaecological conditions. Many reported feeling unsupported.
What happened? CONNECTPlus was co-designed by service users and clinicians to address these challenges by creating a clinically assured, user-friendly, and highly accessible platform that enhances information and awareness, improving access to available services and reducing disparities in health outcomes. CONNECTPlus integrates a variety of innovative features into a digital health platform, including written educational resources, educational videos, and advice on appointment preparation. 50 percent of users reported that the app’s content eliminated the need to contact their healthcare professional, freeing up resources for more urgent care needs. 100 percent of users stated that the app helped them prepare effectively for healthcare appointments, enabling them to organise their thoughts and ask relevant questions. Users reported increased confidence, better understanding of their conditions, and improved health outcomes. CONNECTPlus aligns closely with the Women’s Health Strategy for England, which emphasises the use of digital tools to improve health outcomes and address disparities. By focusing on key areas like menstrual health, menopause, and mental wellbeing, the app supports national efforts to reduce health inequalities and ensure women and girls feel supported throughout their health journeys.
Looking ahead. The success of CONNECTPlus lays the foundation for broader adoption and further innovation, including adding support for more health conditions beyond women and girls’ health, incorporating features such as AI-powered insights for symptom tracking and personalized health recommendations, and scaling the app across the UK.
Better
Overview: The introduction of personalised care plans for sickle cell disease within OneLondon’s Universal Care Plan has transformed the care of sickle cell patients, a group historically disadvantaged by misconceptions and poor-quality care.
Why? Following the No One’s Listening report, calling for major changes in sickle cell care, expanding the UCP to support individuals with sickle cell disease presents an important step. Around 60 percent of people diagnosed with the disease have their treatment in London. Managing the condition effectively requires comprehensive care planning.
What happened? The Universal Care Plan, a shared care planning solution built on Better technology, is designed to address individual patient needs. It ensures that preferences are documented in advance, which is particularly crucial for those who may experience severe pain and struggle to advocate for themselves. The UCP facilitates seamless access to essential patient information for healthcare providers, ensuring that critical details, such as oxygen saturation levels, are readily available during treatment. Developed with input from patients, the plan employs the ACT NOW acronym—Analgesia, Compassion, and Trigger Testing—to guide providers in delivering appropriate care. The new care plan improves health professionals’ awareness of serious complications and enables the recognition and initiation of appropriate treatment measures. This proactive approach aims to reduce the risk of complications and improve health outcomes for individuals with sickle cell disease. Since the launch of the care plans, 6,600 people with the disease now have a plan on the integrated care platform, meaning the service is close to supporting everyone who is cared for in the capital.
Looking ahead. The UCP for sickle cell disease is currently available within London, supported by training programmes for healthcare professionals to ensure effective use of the system. The project sets a precedent for similar improvements in other areas of healthcare.
Optimum Medical
Overview: Vyne Online offers an interactive ordering system with instant validation, live updates and two-click reordering.
Why? Dispensing Appliance Contractors (DACs) have traditionally taken medical device prescription requests over the phone. This interaction has limitations based on opening hours, queues, and inability to validate orders or reorder easily.
What happened? The Vyne Online app covers all of these patient needs: available all day every day, instant order confirmation, visibility of the exact items on the order including customisations, clear tracking of order progress, two-click reorder for regular items, and more. Patients want to understand what is happening to them at a point in their life when many things may be changing. Crucial to this is the hospital discharge process where a patient may be using a medical device such as a catheter or stoma pouch for the first time. Vyne Online allows a clinician to refer a patient and place their first order at point of discharge and alongside the patient. No longer is there a need for the clinician to leave the patient to make the phone call to the DAC, or, when a patient is discharged outside of working hours, for the clinician to need to make the phone call the next working day. The clinician can talk the patient through the referral process and the patient will receive a text message to allow them to access Vyne Online for themselves. The patient can then immediately access their referral and order. Furthermore, it allows the patient to see exactly what items their clinician has prescribed them. The app and website have been available for only nine months, but are already taking over 1,600 orders a month in addition to the many other interactions by patients to check order status and update their details.
Looking ahead. The journey has not finished, and many exciting new features are coming in the short-term such as community referrals during the discharge process, advanced account management to allow hospital wards or community nurse bases to avoid repeat ordering for a patient, and an online chat facility for patients.
Kidney Beam
Overview: Kidney Beam, a virtual rehabilitation app, is a scientifically-proven, kidney-specific physiotherapy and lifestyle management platform shown to improve patient quality of life and demonstrate significant cost savings for the NHS.
Why? Despite proven benefits of physical movement, there are only 3 out of 72 kidney units in the NHS that offer dedicated physio-led rehabilitation for people with a CKD diagnosis, due in part to a shortage of skilled professionals. Unlike other long-term conditions, people with CKD are not routinely counselled about physical activity.
What happened? Professor Sharlene Greenwood and tech entrepreneur Katie Bell set out to launch Kidney Beam, a virtual physiotherapy and lifestyle management app tailored specifically to help people living with kidney disease. The app features over 350 kidney-specific classes, a weekly live class schedule, several signature programmes designed for different disease stages, plus a comprehensive renal rehab intervention developed by clinicians at King’s College Hospital. Kidney Beam is now being rolled out nationwide with the assistance of all 8 NHS England renal networks. This comes following a landmark clinical trial published in the Lancet Digital Health. Carried out at 11 centres across the UK, the research showed a significant improvement in patient-reported quality-of-life among those given access to Kidney Beam’s 12-week digital kidney rehabilitation programme. Patients were shown to benefit from improved mental health & physical function, better ability to self-manage their care, improved symptoms of fatigue, anxiety & depression, and reduced social isolation. In addition to the patient benefits, the trial demonstrated significant cost efficiencies for the NHS, with savings of £580 per patient across reduced hospital visits, out-patient attendances, primary and community care, social care contacts and medication spend.
Looking ahead. Plans for 2025 include wider rollout across the NHS, a new mental health programme and further support for comorbidities such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity.
Isla Health
Overview: Isla’s platform has improved patient care in Cornwall through low-cost Community Lesion Imaging Clinics (CLICs), triaging 2WW skin cancer referrals, reducing face-to-face appointments by 50 percent, and creating an AI-ready database of 489 dermoscopic images.
Why? The Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust (RCHT) Dermatology Service in Truro faced capacity challenges, exacerbated by difficulties obtaining high-quality images in primary care. Tele-triage for skin cancer referrals was contentious due to clinical risks and imaging challenges, and efforts to introduce imaging in primary care met resistance.
What happened? The Dermatology team collaborated with Isla to develop a platform for hosting CLIC outputs and patient-submitted data. The CLIC initiative seeks to streamline the 2WW pathway by identifying non-cancerous lesions or those ready for direct surgical listing, while simultaneously building a national-scale database of de-identified, coded dermoscopic images for AI development. Between August and November 2023, 438 patients (489 lesions) were reviewed, with a median age of 72 (IQR 62-80). Of these, 27.9 percent were discharged directly from triage with advice to the referrer, whilst 20.8 percent were listed directly for biopsy or simple excision, and 49.8 percent avoided face-to-face appointments altogether. Clinicians spent an average of 2 minutes 55 seconds per patient on the CLIC pathway, compared to 20 minutes for traditional face-to-face appointments. This increased specialist capacity for CLIC patients by 50 percent, enabling faster care and reducing unnecessary hospital visits. The department now lists patients directly for surgery when appropriate, streamlining the pathway and reducing patient contact. Although marking the specific surgical site adds complexity, it has proven valuable in minimising visits. Three additional community hubs are set to open, and to support hard-to-reach areas, healthcare support workers on the Isles of Scilly are being trained.
Looking ahead. With funding from the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust, the service will expand to five hubs across Cornwall, whilst the team is now developing a pathway for inflammatory dermatology conditions, and advancing an AI-ready research database.
Sanius Health
Overview: The MyMPNVoice app integrates real-time symptom tracking and wearable biometric data to provide comprehensive insights into MPN patients’ health, demonstrating potential for advancing remote MPN management. By monitoring symptoms and biometric metrics, patients can engage proactively with healthcare providers.
Why? Symptoms of MPN are highly variable and can be difficult to manage effectively without real-time tracking. Moreover, current methods for monitoring MPN symptoms and treatment efficacy often lack patient engagement and do not provide continuous biometric data.
What happened? We’ve collaborated with MPNVoice and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT), to integrate wearable-driven biometric data and PRO measures into a comprehensive solution for MPN patients. The MyMPNVoice app, launched in April 2024, is at the forefront of this innovative approach. The app allows MPN patients to track their symptoms using the MPN-10 total symptom score (TSS) and the EQ-5D-5L quality of life score, while biometric data is continuously collected through a linked wearable device (Withings Smartwatch). By consolidating real-world data (RWD), the platform helps improve disease burden understanding and supports long-term monitoring of symptoms and biometric metrics. This enables more personalised care, allowing patients to communicate directly with their doctors when needed. By the data cut-off on 18th July 2024, 139 patients were enrolled, with a median follow-up of 49 days. Significant differences were observed in the MPN-10 TSS and EQ-5D-5L scores across MPN subtypes. For instance, ET patients had the highest MPN-10 score (mean of 17.0), while PV patients had a mean of 12.8. The analysis also showed significant correlations between TSS and biometric data like activity levels and sleep quality, which varied by MPN subtype.
Looking ahead. With continued development, this platform could become a vital tool in MPN management, improving quality of life and reducing the burden on healthcare systems.
Think Healthcare (Focus Group)
Overview: Analytics can sometimes feel like an area only applicable to a ‘big picture’ view, and not something that brings meaningful local change. With simple but effective data analysis combined with modern digital tools, Think Healthcare helped one practice move the needle and bring big benefits to the masses.
Why? The surgery faced several challenges common to many GP practices, including a lack of detailed data on patient interactions and service demand, along with challenges in managing appointment bookings, prescription requests, and routine enquiries at scale and through differing communication routes.
What happened? The solution, tailored specifically for NHS primary care settings, integrates the advanced Think Healthcare NHS Cloud Telephony module with Virtual Care Navigator (VCN). VCN enables 24/7 access to essential services, allowing patients to book, check, and cancel appointments, order repeat prescriptions, and access other vital services via phone; integrating seamlessly with existing clinical systems. The NHS Cloud Telephony System enhances communication with features like auto-callback, dynamic call routing for vulnerable patient groups, and advanced patient demand analytics to show ‘why’ patients call, not just call volumes. The implementation was a comprehensive process designed to ensure seamless integration and optimal performance involving customised data collection and analysis, performance monitoring and adjustment. Key results included a 92 percent patient access satisfaction rate, a third of calls handled by VCN daily, the automated handling of prescription requests reducing calls by 30 percent, and 80 percent filling the appointment request form immediately, reducing call queues and improving practice responsiveness. This allowed for the reallocation of 3.5 FTE of admin funding into clinical staff.
Looking ahead. By using advanced digital technology to look at the right data to make a difference locally, Think Healthcare hopes to continue to transform the day-to-day experience of all patients.
