Strengthening ICS's in healthcare with RIVIAM Digital Care

NHS, social care, and third sector organisations use RIVIAM Digital Care to receive and manage referrals enabling co-ordination, communication, and care delivery that improves people’s lives.

As an exhibitor for the upcoming Healthcare Excellence Through Technology (HETT) conference in September, we caught up with Paul Targett, Managing Director at Riviam Digital Care to highlight the current digital health landscape and the support for ICS's.

Paul Targett: In the last year, over 1 million parents have used RIVIAM’s eConsent and school-aged immunisation service to support Flu, Covid-19, and other children’s vaccinations across London, West Midlands, Bristol, Bath, and North East Somerset (BaNES), Swindon, Wiltshire, Devon, and East Anglia.

The digital process has given parents peace of mind, improved care, and saved the NHS money. Our estimate – based on customer feedback – is that over this period our immunisation customers freed up and have been able to reprioritise staff triage time worth over £3.9 million.

Outside of vaccination services, RIVIAM provides critical referral management services for community Trusts. Today, RIVIAM enables CAMHS services to receive and process referrals efficiently from across Birmingham and Surrey and our referral management and triage services are used for managing adult community referrals from GPs, acute, social care, and other health professionals in Bath and North East Somerset.

We are increasingly being asked to support the delivery of multi-agency community care. Our platform and services are uniquely positioned to be able to do this and to be a key part of the technology infrastructure needed for joining up local teams delivering new models of care across integrated care systems.

In BaNES there are 13 different organisations working together on RIVIAM – including third sector organisations and BaNES Council – managing referrals and care as part of the Community Wellbeing Hub.
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RIVIAM’s immunisations customers report that compared to a manual process, RIVIAM reduces clinical and administrative time filtering consent forms that require review by approximately 90%. Based on analysis provided by a customer using the ratio of staff they would have required previously to carry out a manual triage of returned paper consents, we have evaluated that processing approximately 1.5 million consents for approximately 1 million parents this year (2021/2022) equates to an approximate cost saving of £3.9 million.

HETT: With your experience, what are some of the biggest challenges that you have identified when working closely with your NHS/Care partners?

Paul Targett: There’s a lot of pressure in the community sector to deliver new models of care. But what we are often told by health and social care professionals is that practical difficulties in sharing information between colleagues securely, easily, and quickly present significant barriers to making these new models a reality.

Added to this, as community health and care delivery moves towards creating a more personalised holistic approach for people, many services are delivered jointly with local authorities and third sector partners, but these organisations can’t securely see the same patient information as their NHS colleagues. They find it hard to deliver what’s required efficiently because of the way the traditional clinical systems are set up.

When multiple organisations come together to set up a virtual ward, for example, the co-ordination of the service is a major obstacle. Each provider has its own systems and processes that must work together with those of others.

Typically, the services end up using spreadsheets as a work-around to keep track of visits and actions. These are inefficient, insecure, and prone to omissions, duplications, and mismatches. In practice, organisations often revert to operating in isolation to mitigate the serious risks and workarounds present and there is no joint working.

The problems are compounded when a partnership comes together to deliver care with organisations that have differing levels of digital maturity. The consent model becomes more complex at this point and there is a need to create a support model that allows people to set and control their consent needs.

HETT: Tell us how working with your products and solutions can help tackle some of the challenges that exist within digital health.

Paul Targett: Our mission is to support integrated care systems by providing low-cost, low-risk solutions that enable care providers to work together without the need for high cost, high complexity, and high-risk replacement of existing systems. The connectivity and interoperability enabled by RIVIAM’s digital services change and improve the way health, social care, and third sector organisations can work together.

Using RIVIAM, our customers can manage consents, referrals, and information so data flows better for improved decision making, informed and co-ordinated delivery of personalised care. This will result in better care and use of community resources, system-wide efficiency, and value for money.

With our eConsent immunisations service, we provide an end-to-end digital service where vaccination outcomes are auto-updated in the clinical system. This helps our customers tackle the need for increasing team productivity, and improving vaccination uptake and quality of care.

With our referral management and triage services, we are at the heart of the current health and care mission to deliver cost-effective, integrated care. Multi-disciplinary teams can use RIVIAM to work together seamlessly to serve local people and tackle health inequalities.

And with RIVIAM's Virtual Ward service, we deliver the ability for virtual wards to be managed across provider organisations.

Our technology makes a patient’s pathway clear – who’s on it, what stage they are at, and what needs to happen for them. Operationally it’s brilliant; everyone with the right access can see one view of the patient and the process flows and information related to the patient’s care.

HETT: We will be hosting HETT Connect again this year, enabling speakers to meet with exhibitors on a 1:1 basis. Who are you hoping to meet?

Paul Targett: We are hoping to meet commissioners of the adult community and children’s services, digital leads, and those leading the transformation of community services. We are also keen to talk to anyone interested in delivering virtual wards managed by multi-agency teams, as well as commissioners or those operating school immunisations services.

HETT: As HETT Show approaches (27-28 Sept @ExCeL London), tell us what you are looking forward to the most at HETT Show 2022.

Paul Targett: We’re looking forward to being at an event where there will be so much optimism that digital health can solve some of the key challenges faced by health and care. We’re certainly optimistic. It’s a good time to be a digital innovator and we’ll showcase our solutions on stand A14. There’s also a great lineup of speakers and we’ll be listening and learning.

HETT: Thank you for your time today Paul. It’s been a pleasure learning more about how Riviam Digital Care contributes to the evolution of the healthcare sector. We look forward to seeing you at HETT Show (27th & 28th September, ExCeL London)!