How CACI is enabling the UCLH Find & Treat team through digital technology

BACKGROUND…

University College London Hospital (UCLH) provide specialist medical services and treatment for acute illnesses across 10 sites around London. This is how we helped them with their mission to deliver top quality patient care, excellent education and world class research.

Since 2007, the UCLH NHS specialist team ‘Find & Treat’ has provided marginalised and vulnerable citizens in the UK healthcare access that bypasses traditional approaches by operating as a mobile healthcare unit and outreach service.

Using an array of highly modified vehicles (Mobile Health Units), the service allows diagnoses and future treatment to be taken directly to patients, significantly improving the ability to reach and treat particularly vulnerable citizens, such as those that are homeless across London and beyond. With their latest innovation, the team is introducing an electric trike, a world first, enabling further reach into commonly inaccessible locations to further enhance the support given to those most in need.

From its outset, the ambition to scale up to a national level and provide services, has remained at the heart of what the Find & Treat service aims to do. One way to achieve this goal has been through the development of advanced technology, which was where a partnership between UCLH and CACI started.

Approximately a decade ago, UCLH and CACI partnered to focus on building ITRICS, a streamlined technical solution that could support the workflow of a real-time end-to-end process from diagnosis to treatment. Since then, we’ve continued to provide support and improvements, and we will be launching a new version that will incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) in summer 2023. This inclusion will significantly improve the patient data available to the medical practitioners.

Find & Treat continues to push the boundaries of accessible healthcare for vulnerable populations. Through our partnership, we will continue to apply an innovative use of technology to support direct connections of patient diagnostics to NHS IT systems without the need for a visit to a hospital or surgery. This will improve access and outcomes for people often missed by traditional healthcare access points.

THE CHALLENGE…

• UCLH operates a specialist outreach team that collaborates with front line service providers to tackle tuberculosis (TB) and associated conditions amongst vulnerable people around the UK and Ireland.
• The organisation wanted to enhance their mobile X-ray service to use the latest technologies to help identify, manage, support and treat patients in real time.
• The original system, based on a full hospital software suite, provided images for later diagnosis only.
• UCLH needed a streamlined solution to support the workflow of a real-time end-to-end process from diagnosis to treatment.
• The available proprietary market solutions were not real time and were prohibitively expensive, reiterating the need for a cost-effective and accurate solution that could help them overcome their challenges.

THE SOLUTION…

• CACI developed a fully mobile solution for UCLH using the latest secure connectivity and Cloud technologies.
• Our approach combined workflow and questionnaire engines within a secure, streamlined, web-based solution, creating a single patient care pathway accessible to all involved NHS professionals.

Other benefits included

• A single point of access for all patient records, clinic information and treatment plans, significantly reducing duplicate, or worse still, lost patient records.
• Recording confidential patient details and up to-date diagnosis/treatment information in a single, secure UK database, fully compliant with NHS data governance policies.
• Provision of End-to-End Managed Service and Hosting for ongoing maintenance and support with the inclusion of industry leading specialist third parties.
• We continue to support the UCLH and Find & Treat team in their endeavours, not only with continued class leading support and development services, but also sponsoring the introduction of their eco-trike to the Health fraternity.

THE RESULTS…

• Easy-to-use mobile technology, readily adopted by healthcare professionals.
• Expandable, vendor neutral solution, which is cheaper to deploy and extend to other points of future care provision.
• Process-centric solution that saves time and avoids duplication of efforts.
• Helps UCLH meet its primary goal of providing high-quality patient care.
• Fully comprehensive End to End Managed Service for Application, Cloud and Hosting support.

“CACI designed and built an innovative tele-radiology solution based on the latest cloud technologies to help UCLH provide a more effective service to vulnerable patients.  The CACI team provides an agile, flexible and pragmatic approach that is a welcome and affordable change from the larger healthcare manufacturers.”