NHS Urgent and Emergency Care: Clinical Triage Platform

NHS England intends to undertake a pre-tender market engagement in relation to the Digital Urgent and Emergency Care Programme.

The NHS Five Year Forward View explained the need to redesign urgent and emergency care services in England.

Recommendations included the need to: • Provide better support for people and their families to self-care . • Help people who need urgent care to get the right advice. • Provide responsive, urgent physical and mental health services outside of hospitals. • Ensure more serious or life threatening emergency are treated in the correct facilities. • Connecting all urgent and emergency care services To support these aims, NHS England wishes to explore the potential for developing a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) that can be consistently used across all care settings by both clinicians and non-clinicians.

Computer-based clinical decision support systems are defined as any software designed to directly aid in clinical decision making in which characteristics of individual patients are matched to a computerized knowledge for the purpose of generating patient-specific assessments.

Specifically NHS England's aim to through the CDSS: • Be able to personalise clinical assessment depending on the patient and their historical and current data. • Use technology and multi-channel approaches to be able to fast track patients to the care they need. • Be able to learn, improve, and develop based on outcomes data.

At this time, NHS England believes that the CDSS may need to comprise the following elements: • Patient Management System. • Decision Support Software. • Prioritisation and Streaming software. • Access to Services Directory. • Interoperability: the ability to interact with a number of existing systems. • Reporting functionality: the ability for national, local and individual user level access to management information. • Assessment of the impact on service design and the workforce. • Digital self-service by users. • Telephone assessment and triage of patients by call centre agents. • Prioritisation and direction by non-clinical staff. • Supporting assessment of patients in a clinical environment. • A single point of syndromic monitoring, and alerting to public health emergencies.

NHS England is committed to having early and meaningful engagement with suppliers, research institutions and clinicians, who can demonstrate innovation and ideas that will contribute to its aims for the development of CDSS.

To achieve this NHS England will hold a briefing day on the 30th November 2015 in London, and it is anticipated this will be followed by a series of market engagement activities.

The briefing event will provide information about our overall vision and business challenges.

To express an interest in the market engagement exercise, organisations are asked to register with our e-sourcing portal.

Further details of how to register are set out in the Additional Text section below.