Another UK hospital trials clinical comms platform Bleepa

UK medical imaging firm Feedback has continued its expansion of its digital communication platform Bleepa with a one-year contract with a large UK hospital.

The UK’s National Health Service is trying to phase out use of outmoded technologies such as pagers and faxes.

But there are concerns that clinical teams are resorting to commercial apps such as Whatsapp, which have not been cleared by regulators for use in clinical settings.

Bleepa been awarded a one-year contract with a value of £84,000 with the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, across several clinical settings.

This builds on a similar pilot scheme run at Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust last year.

The Berkshire trust is keen to evaluate Bleepa as part of its communications strategy and says it is a frontrunner to replace unregulated messaging services.

Feedback said staff will have access to a model dedicated to multi-disciplinary team (MDT) meetings, which are essential to delivering streamlined patient care.

But gathering clinicians from different clinical settings together is time consuming, cost and inefficient, particularly when clinicians are busy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bleepa supports a new way of running MDTs asynchronously and the Bleepa image viewer function will enable each clinical participant in the MDT to see imaging in the correct clinical quality.

This cannot be achieved through screenshares on a video call currently while ensuring regulatory compliance.

A photocapture module enables clinicians to acquire clinical images of patients, such as medical photographs of skin lesions or wounds, where no patient data resides on the device used.

These photographs will be added to the Bleepa patient file which can then be shared with clinical colleagues for discussion and become part of the patient record.

The hospital will provide a clinical evaluation of the photocapture module which will form part of the CE marking process for the new feature.

Feedback will also work with the Trust to evaluate the referral module of the product, linking it to the existing workflow using the trust’s electronic patient record.