Intouch with Health has collaborated with Nasstar to deliver a new digital solution at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, enabling it to serve more than half a million patients annually with a virtual consultation platform that fully integrates with the two patient administration systems (PAS) used across the Trust.
Intouch with Health has deployed its Virtual Clinics and Flow Manager modules alongside Nasstar’s OneConsultation platform.
The OneConsultation platform provides secure, easy to access virtual consultations. Intouch’s Virtual Clinics module integrates the virtual appointment pathway with the Trust’s PAS, delivering a comprehensive patient flow management dashboard for all appointments (virtual and face-to-face). Due to the nature of its care delivery, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust operates two patient administration systems. Integrating the virtual appointment pathway with both patient administration systems provides the Trust with a standardised approach to virtual consultations, and enables staff to schedule, manage and conduct virtual consultations as comprehensively as face-to-face appointments.
Full PAS integration also avoids video consultations being conducted in a siloed process, providing additional benefits including patient authentication during the check-in process and automatically directing the patient into a virtual waiting room until the clinician is ready to see them. Ross Fullerton, Interim Chief Digital & Information Officer, Buckinghamshire Integrated Care Partnership comments: “Like most NHS organisations, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust has a range of systems with service specific functions. What Intouch with Health and Nasstar are doing is getting them to ‘talk’ to each other so that we are more prepared for the ‘new norm’ and can deliver the flexibility that the 500,000 patients we serve annually demand. It means we can be more efficient and provide patients with a fully ‘joined up’ experience, regardless of whether it is in person or virtually.” This partnership is a pioneering example of modern patient management and patient flow, as many NHS Trusts across the country increasingly look to offer patients the choice of consultation type post-pandemic. With the ability to manage both formats seamlessly, the unified system can assist in alleviating the ongoing pressures currently placed on the NHS.
Mike Sanders, CEO of VitalHub UK commented: “COVID-19 has fundamentally altered life over the last year. The global pandemic has, without doubt, been a catalyst for change. Our collaboration with Nasstar shows what can really be achieved with embedded solutions that are fit for purpose as we move forward, providing many benefits for staff such as a reduction in administrative workload, as well as an improved patient experience. Integrating the virtual consultation pathway with both patient administration systems creates a joined-up, sustainable, technological infrastructure at the trust level which can be scaled across geographical regions at ICS level, realising operational and experience benefits previously unobtainable." Ben Mitchell at Nasstar adds: “Blended appointments will increasingly become the norm, but the delivery requires tight integration between various systems and the ability to provide a secure virtual consultation experience that is also easy for a patient to navigate. The joint offering between Nasstar and Intouch with Health provides this, showcasing an exciting future for healthcare.”
This digital system is now being piloted across Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust including hospitals at Stoke Mandeville, Wycombe, and Amersham with further plans to provide virtual consultations across all services including acute and community. In total, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust has approximately 6,000 highly-trained, qualified doctors, nurses, midwives, health visitors, therapists, healthcare scientists and other support staff and cares for more than half a million patients every year.