Sussex ICS to use Bleepa and CareLocker tech as part of national pilot

The Sussex Integrated Care System (ICS) is launching a pilot of Bleepa and CareLocker technology to allow for patient specific pathways to take place through Community Diagnostic Centres (CDC).

The pilot, conducted with Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, will use Feedback’s Bleepa and CareLocker with the aim of linking both primary and secondary care settings.

It follows on from the announcement by NHS England of a £10billion CDC initiative to help reduce the elective care backlog and to bring diagnostic services to community settings. The hope is that this will free up hospitals and help them better manage their inpatients and emergency services.

The CDC will provide a range of diagnostic investigations including medical imaging, blood tests, ECGs and eventually endoscopy services.

Bleepa will provide a digital clinical communication platform enabling investigations to be captured, linked to a specific patient journey and shared by both primary and secondary care settings so they can be reviewed and discussed.

While the CareLocker technology will centrally store the pathway record to ensure it’s visible in all care settings.

The pilot – which is expected to run until March 2022 – will act as a blueprint for how CDCs can be delivered with Sussex ICS named as one of the UK’s CDC exemplar sites.

Dr Ian Francis, deputy medical director at Queen Victoria Hospital said: “We are very pleased to be working with Feedback and believe that the Bleepa platform will enable us to deliver cross-regional care aligned to designated clinical pathways. The patient-centric approach is core to our CDC proposal and the combination of Bleepa and CareLocker will allow us to deliver a connected CDC programme that maximises the impact for staff, patients and the wider system.”

This year Feedback also signed a one-year deal with The Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust to use Bleepa as part of its wider communication strategy.

Dr Tom Oakley, CEO of Feedback, added: “The CDC programme sees the creation of an entirely new care setting and it needs the right digital infrastructure to ensure that it is fully integrated in order to deliver the intended system benefits and to drive down the elective care backlog. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redesign care pathways and service delivery to our citizens.

“We are delighted to be working with such an innovative team across QVH and the wider Sussex ICS and are proud that Bleepa will feature in one of the showcases of the CDC programme. Connecting teams across care settings and presenting clinical data to drive faster decision making is precisely what Bleepa is designed to deliver. The CDC programme is an exciting opportunity for us to demonstrate our technology at a regional level and we believe that this will lead to a number of broader opportunities for Bleepa and our supporting technologies within the CDC programme and beyond.”