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At a prestigious awards ceremony, held at the Lancaster London Hotel on Friday evening, Bloomsbury Health were awarded ‘IT Provider of the Year’ at the General Practice Awards 2016. Dr Phil Hammond was on hand to present the awards that aim to recognise, highlight and reward the hard work and innovation that is carried out every day in surgeries across the breadth of the UK.

Bloomsbury Health’s referapatient® software suite helped them clinch this hotly contested award. referapatient® designed and implemented by Bloomsbury Health was created to solve the issue of doctors receiving rushed or disorganised information when being sent an urgent referral. This would usually be to deal with a patient from either primary or secondary care. Currently, it is being used by over 120 NHS hospitals, by both hospital doctors of all grades and General Practitioners throughout the country.

With the number of urgent referrals inexorably increasing, a few scribbled notes between a referring doctor and specialist are no longer sufficient to provide the quality of service patients expect. referapatient® acts as a ‘digital bridge’ ensuring all referrals and responses to and from specialists are securely documented via a single electronic platform. 

The platform provides a data conduit directly between hospital and primary care electronic patient records, capturing work that is often done over the phone. It includes solutions for regional bed management, patient flow and a user-friendly, Multi-Disciplinary Team meeting interface. Additionally, it saves crucial time for busy GPs who will directly receive a digital letter of advice, from a specialist within 30 minutes of referral in 70% of cases. 

"Doctors need up-to-date information from relevant professionals, no matter where in the country they are,” said Barts Health NHS Trust Consultant Neurosurgeon Mr James Barber. “That even means, on occasion, from ambulances on route to A&E departments, so the infrastructure housing this application needs to be highly secure and available at any time.”

Bloomsbury Health have partnered with UK SME cloud hosting provider Memset, to provide the cloud infrastructure for referapatient® . Having demonstrated a shared vision of an NHS that uses affordable, cutting-edge technology to deliver critical resources in emergency care, Memset also have industry-leading, PGA accredited security in place to ensure patient data is kept secure at all times.

Patients’ whose medical records and patient flow have been entered and tracked through the referapatient® application are receiving specialist advice much quicker than the traditional bleep-and-refer model.

Mr Suresh Pushpananthan, Clinical Director of Bloomsbury Health commented, “the potential to improve patient care so significantly is what we set out to achieve, and partnering with Memset was pivotal in providing the crucial balance between security and accessibility to make referapatient® a successful solution for the NHS.”

Bloomsbury Health were also previously nominated for:

  • EHI 2015 Healthcare IT Product Innovation EHI 2015 Awards Finalist 
  • HSJ Improving Care with Technology 2015: Finalist
  • HSJ Value in Healthcare Awards 2015 Finalist: Value and Improvement in Information Technology
  • HSJ Value in Healthcare Awards 2015 Finalist: Value and Improvement in using IT to support Integrated healthcare services
  • HSJ Value in Healthcare Awards 2015 Finalist: Value and Improvement in Telehealth

About Bloomsbury Health

Bloomsbury Health was courageously founded by NHS professionals in the current stagnating financial recession. A lack of resources has forced ingenuity. Our team of Doctors, Nurses, Web Developers, Network Specialists, Data Security and Data Protection experts (some from FTSE and NASDAQ listed companies) implement proprietary Agile Development models to maintain an unbeatable Value for Money. We excel in solving big clinical problems; our incubator creates symbiotic relationships between big challenges and highly skilled people.