A new and innovative digital referral system between renal and heart failure services is designed to improve patient management and outcomes.
Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust (NCA) and Boehringer Ingelheim Limited (BIL) have begun a Collaborative Working project to provide timely access to specialist input for patients with heart failure, where the management of the condition is limited by chronic kidney disease.
The project will create a secure, virtual, multidisciplinary team platform to allow the timely optimisation of care for patients with these conditions, where advice and guidance are quickly accessible to improve patients’ symptoms and outcomes. The platform will be used by renal teams at NCA as well as referring centres across six localities.
The referral service is integrated with Salford Royal’s electronic health records system – the advice and guidance platform is separate to this but once a case is completed, then the records move onto NCA’s Electronic Patient Record.
The new virtual cardio-renal service will build on Salford’s existing integrated chronic kidney disease service, which includes a virtual primary care monitoring dashboard and multimorbidity clinics.
It’s hoped Patient Pass will support communication with specialist teams for timely interventions to optimise pharmacotherapy (drug treatment) and reduce the number of patients needing to be admitted to hospital.
The project will run from October 2023 to November 2025.