New platform enables rapid deployment of NHS virtual wards

Healthcare specialists from the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust will be among the first in the country to utilise an all-new platform that allows healthcare professionals to develop and deploy highly-tailored virtual wards quickly, and at scale.

The Certified Medical Developer Program (CMDP) has been developed by Dutch digital health company Luscii, which provides remote patient monitoring technology services multiple NHS trusts, 11 countries across Europe and Africa, and over 80 per cent of the hospitals in the Netherlands.

After a six-week digital course to achieve CMDP accreditation, the new platform allows healthcare professionals to self-build software and develop their own remote care programs for virtual wards and for both chronic and acute care, without the need to code.

The arrival of the technology follows NHS England’s announced plans to scale the use of virtual wards to 50,000 virtual beds in 2024 as part of its drive to recover urgent and emergency care services nationwide.

Nick Sinclair, Director Of Operations at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, said:

“The forced reinvention of healthcare practices in response to the Covid pandemic taught us that we can adapt far more quickly than we thought.

“We have a real opportunity now in healthcare to reimagine outdated systems.

“The advancement of remote patient care and monitoring through platforms like Luscii can play a major role in this evolution, delivering major improvements to operational efficiency and patient care.

“With Luscii’s new CMD program, we’re immensely excited that for the first time, we have total freedom of development.

“What this means is the ability to build and adapt our remote patient programs at pace, with the flexibility and scale to meet the specific needs and aspirations of our clinicians.”

Luscii currently provides over 70 remote patient monitoring programs which allow professionals and patients to manage up to 100 health conditions efficiently and remotely, saving time and money and significantly improving patient outcomes.

Programs built with the new platform can be designed to assist with the monitoring and staged-recovery of patients who have ongoing acute and chronic conditions such as heart disease, those recovering from serious illness or those simply needing to follow pre, or post-operative, protocols.

As a technology facilitating virtual wards, the Luscii platform assists healthcare professionals to determine any patient’s current state of health or recovery based on specific vital sign information, such as blood oxygen and blood pressure, provided by patients via the Luscii app.

AI algorithms can be configured within programs to trigger notifications to patients, and/or alerts to healthcare professionals, based on any anomaly in patient responses, or measurements straying outside safe and expected thresholds.

Luscii founder, Daan Dohmen, said:

“We’ve been very fortunate to have worked with, and benefitted from, the expertise of a large number of preeminent healthcare professionals who are leaders in their field to create cutting-edge remote care programs that improve patient experience whilst also dramatically reducing the number of hospital admissions.

“For us, the natural and logical next step in our platform’s evolution is to put the power to adapt, develop, and in some cases, completely reimagine these programs, directly in the hands of the brilliant minds who are on the frontlines of healthcare.

“As a first-of-its-kind self-build platform, we are now giving them the superpower to create the future of healthcare.”

A dozen healthcare practitioners from around the world, including some from the NHS, have already enrolled to receive CMDP accreditation, with the first cohort having just completed the six-week course.