CrossCover by Primum Digital Ltd

Overview

Front-line NHS staff are faced with complex decisions and have limited access to supportive tools. The CrossCover platform contains a range of clinical speciality web applications designed to assist clinicians in making the best decisions for every patient encounter. This enables patients to be given the right care in the right place at the right time. 

NHS consultants are our most experienced decision makers, but there are not enough of them to see every patient presenting to our Emergency Departments (EDs) and every patient presenting to Primary Care. 

The reality is more junior NHS staff make a large proportion of the decisions relating to patient care. Greater variation in practice can lead to suboptimal care decisions, poor patient outcomes, longer length of stay in EDs, repeat presentations to Eds and GPs and unnecessary follow up. 

CrossCover enables patient-facing clinical staff to follow best practice national guidelines adapted by their local expert NHS consultants. The platform facilitates these consultant experts to edit existing or build new easy to follow, fully illustrated interactive patient care. 

This ensures standardised information is given to front-line clinicians working throughout the integrated community and hospital care network, enabling rapid and optimal decisions that are essential for patient care. Designed to provide Trust-wide or Integrated Care System wide optimised clinical decision support pathways.

The Technology

CrossCover is a cloud hosted, decision support tool designed to provide educational reference information through user-generated decision support pathways. It enables health care professionals to use their own knowledge and judgement to make a clinical decision, supported by the tool. 

Information is provided as needed and is accessed on all devices with an internet connection. 

“OrthoPathway” is the name for the application which supports decision making for musculoskeletal conditions. Orthopaedic presentations account for a third of all medical presentations worldwide. 

The nature, types and local discrepancies and nuances in care and services means that guidelines and best practice can be hard to implement at a local level meaning discrepancies in care. The platform is customisable for local requirements, supports better decision making through building an evidence-based care pathway, and breaks every problem down to its fundamental components to provide expert and consistent care.

CrossCover and Cloud Gateway

We are a secure connectivity specialist working with healthcare organisations to ensure their networks are intelligent for the connected health services they want to deliver. We provide our Health Connect platform for them to securely connect their Google Cloud environments with the Health & Social Care Network. This allows clinicians to access the CrossCover platform quickly and easily from any device where they have an internet connection.

The Impact

Our partnership with CrossCover is delivering a range of benefits for them and their patients, including:

• Establishing best practice to ensure consistent care across the health service

• Access to a rich analytics pool, including real time budget data and carbon tracking, driving better decision making

• Improving and minimising bottlenecks in treatment

• Enabling more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing across the health service and front line staff

• Reducing health inequalities by standardising care

• Helping to reduce emissions from care miles and surgical pathways, while supporting low-carbon decision making

Connected Health

CrossCover is the first Development and Operations (DevOps) platform for clinical pathways. This means that through the cloud there is an application for every surgical speciality available on all devices. This brings clinical expertise to the palm of your hand. The technology enables experts to collaborate at scale, consolidate optimal clinical decision support processes ​and spread this knowledge into the core workflow of all staff, ensuring patients receive optimal treatment every time. It enables collaboration at scale across an Integrated Care System and acts as a force multiplier of clinical expertise to support providing a best practice care pathway.

Greener NHS

It is estimated that 5% of the traffic on the roads is NHS traffic and 9% of the NHS carbon footprint is related to patient and visitor transport. The average patient travels 15 miles in urban areas and 27 miles in rural areas for an outpatient appointment. Reducing this traffic can have a significant impact on the environment.  Quantitative evidence provided by an independent Health Economic Study suggests optimised decision support pathways can reduce outpatient appointments by 50- 75% representing a vast reduction on outpatient miles. In addition the platform can support GPs to run low-carbon community diagnostic hubs and reduce unnecessary imaging requests. The pathways enable the promotion of sustainable mobility aids and support decisions to use the last splint as the first splint in trauma to minimise waste without compromising on care.

CrossCover won the NHS England/ NHS Improvement SBRI Healthcare Competition 18 "Delivering a Net Zero NHS" Development Award.