Open Medical has been engaged to use its PATHPOINT Referral Management platform to improve the quality of information in referrals to the service and determine the priority of requests.
The outcome should be a digitally enabled occupational therapy triage pathway that reduces the amount of time occupational therapists spend chasing and assessing referrals, releasing clinical capacity to address waiting lists.
The RCE is funded by the Moray Growth Deal in Scotland to support inward investment and jobs and, in line with this, the project should also create a new asset that Open Medical can commercialise for other services that need to balance rising demand with limited resources.
Marie Simpson, a programme manager at Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre, and a registered Occupational Therapist herself, said: “The RCE is a £5 million project funded by the UK government through the Moray Growth Deal to drive economic growth, with a particular focus on digital health and social care innovation in rural areas.
“We are raising the profile of the Moray region as a hot spot for digital companies that want to develop and test their ideas and innovation for health and social care. We have partnerships in place with the public sector and citizens to act as a test bed for innovation. This project is a great example of how we work in practice.
“The local occupational therapy service, managed by Health & Social Care Moray (HSCM), has been experiencing a rise in requests for support, so we looked at the pathway and at where digital could help. Now, we are working with Open Medical to improve the service model – improving the quality of referrals and triaging them automatically.
“The project should help Occupational Therapists, because they will be able to do more of the work they trained for, instead of office admin and chasing information. It should be better for citizens, because they will be able to get the support they need, faster, and it will create an asset that Open Medical can take to other services supported by DHI’s international networks.”
HSCM’s team of community Occupational Therapists and occupational therapy assistants provides support to people who need home adaptations or equipment to help with daily living tasks, such as toileting, accessing bathing facilities or managing stairs.
Anybody can make a referral to the service with the citizen’s consent, which is screened by the access care team and triaged by a qualified Occupational Therapist. However, at times, the service receives referrals that may be incomplete or not fully appropriate, requiring additional clinical time for prioritisation and impacting routine work.
Open Medical and the DHI held workshops with Occupational Therapists to understand the challenges and what they wanted from a new innovative digitally enabled service.
The company has integrated PATHPOINT Referral Management with the Mydex CIC Personal Data Store – an RCE R&D project that makes it easier for patients to upload information about themselves and share it with local health and care and third sector services.
The integration allows patients to enter their data once to re-use to access other services, reducing the need to repeat themselves, while improving the quality of information in the referrals that the occupational therapy service and other services receive.
Open Medical will also use the automation tools in PATHPOINT Referral Management to screen out ineligible referrals, to signpost people who don’t need the service back to the local Community Connections service directory linking people to sources of help, and to determine whether users need a digital or face-to-face assessment.
Dr Tim Hoogenboom, head of research at Open Medical, said: “It is fantastic to see the DHI taking a pro-active approach to finding digital solutions to address the problems faced by health and care services, while supporting companies with innovative ideas that extend their R&D.
“Our own approach to research and development is always to start by getting a real understanding of workflow, and we have really enjoyed collaborating with the DHI and the occupational therapy team in Moray to determine how our referral management toolkit can evolve.
“At the end of the day, the systems we build must adapt to, and be supportive of, the way that clinical teams work – and not the other way around. So, if the occupational therapists need something that our technology cannot support, we’re committed to developing that functionality.
“The testing phase of the project is about to start, so we look forward to feedback from users and the occupational therapy team on whether this new solution will work not just for them, but for occupational therapy services in the UK and globally.”
Open Medical is a specialist provider of patient flow solutions. Its PATHPOINT Referral Management product has been developed as part of its work in trauma, dermatology and other clinical specialties.
PATHPOINT Referral Management improves referral quality and data capture, enabling more streamlined patient triage and reviews, and provides two-way communications along the referral pathway.
In Moray, Open Medical has completed the integration of the PATHPOINT platform with the PDS and is about to test the new referral pathway with trial users.
There will then be a process of refining the new system, before a decision is made on whether to adopt it permanently. If the project is successful, Open Medical plans to commercialise the work to create a new occupational therapy product.
