NHS Tower Hamlets CCG is keen to test the potential provider market for Tele-dermatology and One-stop Advice Treatment Service (OATS).

Service Description The core aim of the Teledermatology and One Stop Assessment and Treatment Service (OATS) is to improve the quality of healthcare services and clinical outcomes for patients with Dermatological conditions, reduce waiting times for access to assessment and treatment, facilitate patients being seen by the right provider at the initial point of contact, increase access for patients with Dermatological conditions as an alternative to secondary care assessment and provide value for money through increasing efficiency.

The key benefits of the proposed service will be to provide: • equality of access to patients • treatment and care close to home as quickly as possible in accessible locations • reduced unnecessary utilisation of secondary and tertiary resources • reduced variability in the quality of service delivery, including transport issues, waiting times, and availability of follow up appointments. • continuity of care and avoidance of multiple referrals or repeated investigations.

Lead Provider Model In this model, Tower Hamlets CCG will commission the Teledermatology and One Stop Assessment and Treatment Services (OATS) to a single provider that will then both provide care and integrate existing and other providers into a programme of care for the Tower Hamlets Dermatology patient population.

It is the prime contractor’s task to ensure that every part of the overall Dermatology programme is delivered in a way that joins up with the other parts of the pathway.

This provides the prime contractor/lead provider (with its subcontractors) the ability to construct an overall pathway of care and incentives that provide Tower Hamlets CCG, as the commissioner, with the outcomes that they want whilst remaining within the available budget.

Commissioning for outcomes and quality not activity based The commissioners, NHS Tower Hamlets CCG, plan to a whole systems approach moving beyond productive/technical efficiency (i.e. maximising the efficiency of any one institution) towards allocative efficiency (i.e. maximising the efficiency of a pathway served by more than one provider).

To incentivise this collaboration and consideration of allocative efficiency, the commissioners will align financial incentives for the lead provider into delivery of a single set of outcome measures, shared by all providers within the system of care.

Therefore, the commissioner, NHS Tower Hamlets CCG will commission a service that is supported by a block outcomes based contract.

This means that the successful bidder will be awarded 70% payment upon award of the contract, with the remainder 30% value upon successful evidence of the expected outcomes measured by the KPI’s defined within the contract.

The total value of the contract over 5 years is £1,209,574.