Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has awarded a contract worth an estimated £495,000 to clinical infrastructure specialist Feedback, for the provision of the Bleepa Community Diagnostics Centre (CDC) solution.
Bleepa is a clinician-facing platform that sits on top of Feedback’s CareLocker product as a data layer, providing clinical results at a “certified and regulated quality” and enabling dialogue with colleagues through a chat interface that links back to the patient record. Feedback has called the contract award an opportunity to continue delivery of “the core digital infrastructure required for CDCs to reduce the elective care backlog and deliver a programme for the maximum benefit of staff, patients and the wider NHS”.
A pilot programme already delivered at the trust has reportedly delivered cost and time savings, including a “substantial reduction in wait time” in comparison to the national 18-week referral-to-treatment target without need for additional clinical staff.
CEO Dr Tom Oakley stated that after two years of piloting the CDC solution with the trust, the contract will allow for the expansion of the service offering to multiple GP practices and beyond the piloted breathlessness pathway into other specialty areas.
He added that the symptom-based pathway on Bleepa is “an approach which has demonstrated huge potential to cut wait times and improve care for patients” and said that the contract will “give others the confidence to progress with this care model and our platform, allowing us to now move forward to capture both the regional and national opportunity in front of us and ultimately to bring better, faster care to patients across the UK.”
The contract is set to run for 12 months, with the potential of extending for a further 12 months.
In June, Dr Oakley shared insights with HTN on the future of multidisciplinary teams; click here to read more.
Last November we explored an independent evaluation of Bleepa in place at the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust which highlighted a decrease in referral response times of 87 percent.
