Company: Consultant Connect
Founder: Jonathan Patrick
Website: https://www.consultantconnect.org.uk/
About Consultant Connect
Consultant Connect is one of the UK’s leading telemedicine providers, supplying technology services and clinical capacities to improve patient care in the NHS.
Consultant Connect is formalising, speeding up and scaling what doctors naturally like to do and always have done: discuss a patient case with another colleague/specialist when they have exhausted all options within their remit.
Previously, GPs and paramedics would have to go through hospital switchboards to get specialist advice, which could take hours or even days. This would often mean they would not be able to do it and would have to revert back to sending patients to A&E or refer onto hospital lists with long waits.
However, Consultant Connect’s app, GPs and paramedics to connect with available consultants within under 30 seconds via secure phone calls and GDPR-compliant sharing of photos and messages.
The solution is simple yet powerful. Clinicians get the advice they need straight away and ensure their patients get sent to the right place first time.
This invariably leads to the avoidance of unnecessary hospital visits. It’s also incredibly successful, with 66% of interactions on the platform leading to the avoidance of an unnecessary admission.
Consultant Connect works with over half of the NHS across England, Scotland and Wales. It covers over 42 million patients and is available to more than 5,000 GP surgeries and over 10,000 consultants. To date, more than two million calls have been placed and three million photos have been taken through the service. Last year, it helped over 400,000 patients avoid unnecessary hospital admissions.
A good example of its work is its project in Warwickshire, which is connecting paramedics and GPs directly to local hospital consultants to assess whether patients over 75 need to go to hospital. In the last 12 months, more than 1,400 calls have been placed through the app and around 50% of these resulted in the patients being treated at home. By treating people in the community, instead of in hospital, Warwick Hospital has been able to close a surge ward, saving more than £1.5 million in temporary staffing costs.
Consultant Connect’s technology is also used to triage existing waiting lists. The company has a list of consultants located around the country (known as the National Consultant Network) that can be deployed in hospital departments to remove patients from hospital waiting lists where appropriate.
An example of this work is in Kettering General Hospital, where neurologists cut the waiting list in half in fewer than two months by triaging over 1,000 referrals in fewer than two months. These patients were removed from the waiting list via a referral to an alternative pathway or returned to their GP with a treatment plan.
These projects are saving lives, saving NHS consultants a lot of stress and saving the NHS millions of pounds every year, showing the power of simple technology.
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