Ensuring accessibility to patient data

Feedback Medical enables clinical data to travel with the patient, says CEO Dr Tom Oakley

Many healthcare systems are in a state of transformation, so patients and the clinical workforce need easy-to-use, flexible digital solutions available from anywhere. Feedback Medical enables clinicians to make better decisions faster from any location as our solutions are designed to be applicable to any care setting internationally.

We provide a digital infrastructure that ensures clinical data travels with the patient

– making it available to all care settings and enabling clinicians to contribute to their care from anywhere. It also removes the geographic constraints of care, giving patients choice, clinicians flexibility and care providers workforce resilience.

Our solutions are currently in use in the UK National Health Service trusts (providers of state-funded acute, community and mental health services), regional NHS crossprovider care pathways and community diagnostic centres and private healthcare facilities. In India they are found in remote care facilities and regional acute hospitals in Odisha State and clinical imaging centres in Indore.

The Bleepa app

Bleepa allows clinicians to review medical imaging and other clinical results and discuss cases collaboratively on the go. The Bleepa app on each clinician’s mobile device enables them to:

• Communicate with members of their clinical team who are based at other locations

• Work collaboratively with colleagues at times and at locations that work for them both

• Refer patients across their network with all relevant documentation

• Quickly take photographs for patient care (e.g. wounds, dermatological conditions and scar tissue)

• Easily capture the patient’s consent for their medical use. Securely upload photos and documents to the patient’s e-health record, to be viewed by a specialist at the most appropriate time

“The referral form in Bleepa allowed us to capture really important clinical information about the patient which importantly not only allowed us to plan treatment but also gave the clinicians more information, in one place, at one time, in order to aid them to triage patients’ requirements,” Janine Beattie, EPR Clinical Configuration Lead, told us.

Having centralised data around a patient in Bleepa, CareLocker provides a patientcentric way of storing that data in the cloud, ensuring its availability to any care setting that the patient attends. Patients can view their medical data on their own device, share it with others, and upload other documents allowing for a comprehensive care record.

Process improvements and time savings

In December 2019, when the respiratory team at the Royal Oldham Hospital in the UK wanted to improve the referral process and response time for inpatient referrals, Feedback Medical deployed Bleepa to manage inpatient referrals to the respiratory team. By moving away from a process that was manual and paper based, the respiratory referral workflow was streamlined by ensuring a single point of access for inpatient specialist referrals. In addition, the use of Bleepa has standardised the referral process to include greater clinical detail, informing clinical decision making and collaboration.

The introduction of Bleepa and removal of manual administrative steps reduced the length of time for respiratory inpatient referrals to be actioned to just 0.4 days, an average saving of 1.7 days per referral. In addition, response time to referrals was reduced to less than one minute from an average 7.5 minutes, saving around 6.5 minutes per referral, or around 5.6 weeks of a full-time clinician’s time per year.

Similarly, over the past year Feedback Medical has been working with a UK regional cross-provider care system, connecting primary and secondary care via its community diagnostic centre (CDC), to deliver end-to-end symptom-based pathways. Our digital infrastructure enables patients to move seamlessly between primary and secondary care for definitive investigation and management based on their symptoms.

At Queen Victoria Hospital we have demonstrated that CDCs can be used to successfully deliver cross-provider symptom-based diagnostic pathways that transform the patient journey within the NHS and we expect to be able to show a meaningful impact on patient waiting lists as a result. ICSs need to adopt a symptombased pathway approach to CDCs if they are going to deliver the expected impact on cancer and elective care waiting times. This pilot is the first example in the country of how this can be delivered, and our digital infrastructure is an essential component of delivering it.

Preventive and non-hospital care

Many healthcare systems globally face the challenge of a high proportion of people managing lifestyle-based non communicable diseases (NCDs). Bleepa can enable more proactive preventive care to reduce complications around chronic conditions like diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) and coronary heart disease by providing enhanced communication among primary care doctors to help keep patients out of a secondary care setting, as well as swi and flexible sharing of results and imaging for clinical review.

Feedback Medical provides both the digital and physical infrastructure for remote TB screening in Odisha state to enable frontline clinicians in remote areas to carry out X-ray studies and transmit them securely to specialists. Once the x-rays are transmitted by Bleepa to our CareLocker cloud store, the scans are then processed by our AI partner Qure.ai, which generates a patient report that is made available to the scanning clinician via Bleepa. The clinician is then able to quickly identify tuberculosis patients or those most at risk and act accordingly. Our initial pilot, which went live in March 2022, identified signs of TB in around 21 per cent of patients scanned in its first five months.

For patients, having their clinical data readily available is the best option, enabling better patient outcomes through streamlined care.