County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust launches digital health service

County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust (CDDFT) in partnership with InHealthcare has this week launched the new Health Call digital healthcare service.

Unveiled simultaneously at the NHS Innovation Expo 2013 in London, and in Spennymoor, County Durham, the partnership is taking up the challenge of reaching 10,000 patients through the use of digital healthcare technology.

Through the link-up, CDDFT has been able to design and develop its own digital healthcare pathways using InHealthcare’s unique N3-based healthcare platform which is built on industry standards that allow NHS organisations to not only create new innovative digital healthcare services, but also to interoperate with existing patient systems.

This flexibility and open approach has helped remove the stigma that appears to have tarnished the digital health sector

As InHealthcare is a healthcare service company rather than a hub or medical device manufacturer, it means the pathways built on Iits platform can potentially use any telehealth hub or medical device. Data from remote monitoring devices can also be shared with clinicians through existing clinical systems.

CDDFT has already automated and digitised several clinical pathways for the launch of Health Call, including INR self-testing and a community-based nutritional screening service.

Trust spokeswoman, Jane Haywood, said: “We, like many other NHS organisations, carried out pilots on telehealth using multiple hubs to evaluate benefits. We quickly realised that we needed to be more flexible, but more importantly we needed standardisation across the whole health economy. Working with InHealthcare has allowed us to realise this and we can now focus on clinical and patient outcomes without barriers in technology. Simply put, we can pick and choose the right devices to deliver the right outcomes.

“We found that by working with an open system, the flexibility and automation of pathways brought new ways of working at CDDFT.”

Saneth Wijayaratna, chief scientific officer at InHealthcare, added: “Our vision was to enable our NHS colleagues to own the digital health ecosystem. Our flexible approach has allowed clinicians to be involved in the development of the whole system. As we are not a hardware manufacture, we are open to work with any vendor, for example, the new NICE-approved AF device used to develop a digital AF service in partnership with Microlife.

We found that by working with an open system, the flexibility and automation of pathways brought new ways of working

“This flexibility and open approach has helped remove the stigma that appears to have tarnished the digital health sector. We are working hard in automating and developing new digital care pathways. The launch of Health Call is an exciting time for the sector and we will continue to develop and launch new services over the course of 2013.

“We believe that we have started something great with CDDFT and we will continue to support them to deliver on the financial challenges, but more importantly the patient benefits that have already been achieved through automation and digitalisation of healthcare in the community.”