NHS Innovation Award
An innovative scheme that not only uses electronic referral and a PACS (picture archiving and communications system) but also software that plots healing patterns based on archived images has won an award for Innovative Service Delivery in the British National Health Service (NHS) Innovations Health & Social Care Awards.
HITEA Best use of IT
This award was a result of collaboration between some of the most prominent organisations in UK healthcare information management.
Visit the HITEA Award Site
NHS Service Delivery
West Midlands NHS Innovations Innovative Service Delivery Award 2005.The aim of the competition was to identify examples of innovation from NHS organisations in the West Midands region that have the potential to lead to improvements in healthcare delivery.
Welcome
The Leg Ulcer Telemedicine (LUTM) Service was programmed and developed by consultant vascular surgeon Simon Dodds at the Good Hope Hospital, Sutton Coldfield. It consists of a secure electronic clinical-record system that allows the storage and processing of colour images.
Leg ulcers affect 0.2% of the population at any time, most of whom are elderly. Direct costs of treatment are in the region of £600m per year in the UK.
The high cost of treating leg ulcers is mainly due to the need for repeated dressing by community nurses over extended periods of time, and studies have shown that only a quarter of them are healed after three months of treatment in the community.
Revolution in Medical Technology
The Leg Ulcer Telemedicine (LUTM) System is a dedicated, secure, asynchronous, shared electronic care record (ECR) system specifically designed to create a fast and effective communication link and e-referral system for community nurses and community or hospital-based leg ulcer and chronic wound clinics.The LUTM system has been designed with a simple, intuitive user interface that allows the incorporation of colour digital images into the shared ECR. The LUTM software includes ulcer size measurement and automatically plots ulcer healing as a graph that can be exported and printed. The system is designed to operate over the NHS net using existing computers.
Evidence from a randomised trial at Good Hope Hospital in the West Midlands demonstrated that patients managed using the LUTM system showed a 25% reduction in community treatment costs (£200 per patient). This, compared with conventional paper-based record equates to approximately £250,000 annual cost saving per 100,000 population.
If reproduced across the UK and properly supported this model of care would be predicted to cut the cost of managing chronic wounds by 25 to 50% - around £300,000,000 per annum.
The LUTM system can be easily extended to include other clinical problems such as dermatology, 'diabetic foot' and tissue viability.
