About CARE IS

Care IS Ltd is a UK provider of clinically commissioned information solutions, created by clinicians and built by IT experts. We are partners of BPAC Clinical Solutions, a New Zealand-based not-for-profit organisation with many years of experience in clinical decision support and eReferrals in Australia and New Zealand.

About CARE IS

Our team of experts includes practising clinicians and IT specialists in the UK and New Zealand, and managers experienced in delivering point-of-care digital knowledge products worldwide.

Care IS exists to:
  • Improve quality of patient care
  • Improve efficiency and reduce workload in general practice
  • Reduce cost and save time
  • Work shoulder to shoulder together with the NHS to make use of the latest technology in pursuit of better patient care

What is Valida?
Valida is an in-consultation solution for non-clinical triage, clinical referral, decision support, shared care records and risk stratification. Designed for general practice by general practitioners and practice nurses, with our own expert IT development team, based on over a decade of real-life experience in New Zealand and Australia, the philosophy underlying the system is that it should slip seamlessly into the normal workflow, be intuitive, localised, and improve productivity and clinical outcomes.

The system has been developed and has been in widespread use since 2005 in New Zealand and is now implemented in 98% of General Practices. Valida clinical content is based on NICE guidelines. Implementation of Valida has been shown to:
  • improve healthcare professional concordance with best practice guidance;
  • improve patient counselling and care;
  • improve clinical outcomes; and
  • reduce costs.

Valida consists of a suite of applications designed to assist health professionals in providing the best care for their patients. Each application supports a wide range of health specialities, automating non-clinical triage and referrals, acting as a virtual specialist, guiding the clinician through the collection of appropriate data, identification of areas of concern and suggestions for treatment and follow up.

The Valida way
About CARE IS

Valida, smarter together, is the Care IS way. We work hard to form lasting relationships and partnerships with our clients, and work with you to deliver the best solutions to fit your needs. Care IS and our partners BPAC Clinical Solutions currently have relationships in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Valida’s record of success
Valida was Launched in New Zealand (population 4.5m) in 2005, and has an impressive set of achievements:
  • Used in 98% of practices
  • Integrated into the standard workflow
  • In the current year to date is has been used 21,796,711 times per year, or 14,400 interactions per hour
  • Allows GP to assess and manage care
  • Offers care management via referral for:
    • Treatment, i.e. prescribing,
    • testing, i.e. laboratory and radiology
    • opinion, i.e. referral to secondary or community services

Valida Client works by being fully integrated with EMIS and SystmOne. Integration with Microtest/Vision is in process, with integration with the NHS eReferral Service underway now for completion later in 2018.

Valida’s suite of services includes:

Valida Referrals – to guide complete and correct referrals, send forms to the right place with all appropriate patient information attached, and full read and write back functionality into the patient record;
Valida Care Navigator – triage by trained non-clinical staff for common complaints/requests for appointments, ensures patients get right care from right provider including family, with full write back to clinical record.
Valida My Care Choice Register – to manage care choices and consent, and share the most up-to-date patient requirements and wishes with all care partners

Does Valida work?
In New Zealand, the following impressive results have been seen.
  • Care Navigator has led to a 22% shift in care provision in one practice trial
  • Colonoscopy referrals: 55% of paper referrals were returned, but 0% of Valida Referrals sent electronically were returned
  • Major joint replacement referrals: 32% reduction in referral rates, using Valida Referrals
  • Chronic kidney disease: 100 % appropriate referral criteria met using Valida Referrals, 82% virtual assessment, compared to 34% appropriate referral criteria met using traditional referral, with less than 8% virtual assessments
  • • Australian Pilot in Melbourne: 9500+ referrals, 0% were returned for additional information, 0% not looked at, 2 days were cut from oncology wait times, and savings were made of
    • More than £1500 per year in administration for a small practice (<5000 patients)
    • Over £6750 for a moderate practice (5000-10000)
    • Over £10,000 for large practices (>15,000)

How does Valida Work?
The Valida suite is integrated, web-based software as a service (SaaS), or software as a medical device (SaaMD). It reads the patient record in real time, passing the data through a rules engine to provide patient and time specific management advice to healthcare professionals.

Valida is integrated into the following on the clinician desktop:
  • EMIS
  • TPP SystmOne

And work is underway for integration soon with
  • Microtest
  • INPS Vision
  • eReferrals Service from NHS Digital

NHS Benefits
In its first year Valida has already started to make a difference to the NHS. In North East Essex CCG:
  • outcomes are improved with patients treated to evidence-based guidelines,
  • referral gating/rules are based on CCG’s CPP criteria, with risk is managed in primary care,
  • costs are reduced with a reduction/elimination of inappropriate referrals,
  • Secondary care has the supporting history and investigations to manage the patient, and
  • expected benefits of a minimum reduction of 10% to 15% of inappropriate referrals plus 100% of referrals meet criteria.

How Care IS Work with You
Our aim is to work alongside you, to deliver solutions to the problems that cost time and money, and to improve compliance and patient care. Care IS’s Valida will provide improvements in care and cost reductions. It is these which provide the business case for investing in Valida, and on which Care IS builds relationships. Based on improvements in the quality of clinical care and cost reductions, projections show that when used with only five key clinical pathways there is a return in year one of between 140% and 500%*. Additional pathways are provided that simply increase the return on investment (ROI). If you are already commissioning other services that overlap, these can be decommissioned at additional savings, further increasing the ROI.

Some of these savings such as reduced drug costs and fewer referrals to out-patients are immediately realisable. Other cost savings arise from reductions in unscheduled admissions or inappropriate referrals.

Costs of admin support are reduced when using Valida Referrals and Care Navigator, not only through reducing the effort required to make referrals, but also by cutting the amount of toing and froing by making a complete and appropriate referral every time.

Time is saved in general practice by Valida Care Navigator, because it makes sure each GP appointment is appropriate, and that patients are routed to the best care available. This might include recommending self-care by the patient themselves or their family, seeking advice from the pharmacy, or an appointment with another professional. It might also mean escalating urgent cases without waiting for a GP appointment.

*(such as those seen in the TIA study described in Ranta, A., Dovey, S., Weatherall, M., O'Dea, D., Gommans, J. and Tilyard, M. (2015). Cluster randomized controlled trial of TIA electronic decision support in primary care. Neurology, 84(15), pp.1545-1551.)