A new digital system is under development to support the delivery of occupational health services in the Moray region of Scotland.
The Moray Rural Centre for Excellence for Digital Health and Care Innovation (RCE) is working on the project with technology company Open Medical, supported by £5 million from the UK Government under the Moray Growth Deal.
It involves the use of the company’s Pathpoint Referral Management platform in an occupational therapy triage pathway to reduce the time spend by therapists chasing and assessing referrals, providing more clinical capacity to support people on the waiting lists.
Open Medical is planning to test the new referral pathway using the platform with trial users.
It will use the automation tools in Pathpoint to screen out ineligible referrals, signpost people who do not need the service back to the local Community Directions service directory, and determine whether users need a digital or face-to-face assessment.
Further functionality
Dr Tim Hoogenboom the company’s head of research, said: “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.”
Marie Simpson, programme manager at the RCE, said: “The local occupational therapy service, managed by Health and 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.”
The Pathpoint platform has been integrated with the Mydex CIC Personal Data Store to enable patients to enter their data once to re-use and access other services.
