Outpatient Video Consultation Pilot Evaluation

As part of a national outpatient improvement offer, NHS England and NHS Improvement are piloting a nationally supported and deployed video consultation platform with a number of trusts across England. Supported by a small national project team of three WTEs, the project commenced in April 2019 and will run until December 2020. The project team procured a suitable video platform via competitive tender and it has since been deployed to trusts via sub-licence arrangements. Participant trusts are at varying stages of implementation, while some have fully deployed the platform, others are still in the early planning stage. The solution is wholly web-based, conforms to the highest security standards, is IG compliant and has been proven to work at scale in the NHS in Scotland and across Australia in many clinical specialties. The platform is to be piloted in circa 35 trusts across approximately 120 individual services in areas such as paediatrics, respiratory, orthopaedics, diabetes, cancer services and mental health services. NHS England and NHS Improvement now seek to procure an evaluation study of the pilot to better understand the impact of outpatient video consultations on both NHS providers and service users and the impact of the national team's role in enabling adoption. The learnings from the evaluation will enhance NHS England and NHS Improvement's understanding of the impact of video on care delivery and its potential to contribute to long term plan commitments. The findings will also inform consideration of a more systematic, nationally supported, roll-out of video consulting capability across the NHS in England beyond the pilot.