We catch up with David Brown, Managing Director at CLEO Systems
As we come to the end of the fiscal year, it’s time for us to reflect on 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 – it’s been a successful and busy time for us here at CLEO Systems! We are achieving giant strides in transforming Secondary, Urgent, and Emergency care with our intuitive integrated software solutions. We have expanded our CLEO CORE solution to more Urgent Treatment Centres and an IUC CAS service provided in the North of England. Our Electronic Prescribing System, CLEO SOLO EPS, is also now being used by 11 - soon to be 15 - NHS Trusts! We feel extremely proud to be able to provide a healthcare solution that adds value to other organisations and is getting amazing feedback!
As well as deployments of our solutions across the country, we’ve been meeting lots of you at industry exhibitions and conferences and keeping up to speed with all things digital health!
Can you tell us about your latest deployments and developments with clients?
Yes of course! Our whole ethos at CLEO Systems is to put the patient at the centre of our solutions while collaborating with clients on digital innovations and we have had some really exciting launches and deployments over the last 12 months. We continue trailblazing with our CLEO SOLO EPS solution: the first of a kind electronic prescribing solution which send prescriptions to community pharmacies from within a Secondary Care Outpatient setting. This follows our NHS England accreditation in the summer of 2022.
Most recently, we have announced the successful pilot with Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and CLEO Systems for additional cost centres (Y codes). This new functionality addresses the standardisation of the Cost Code Charging Model across Primary and Secondary Care, which has seen the format of EPS request messages being standardised to a single FHIR message format. This new development supports the NHS Business Services Authority’s ability to identify the appropriate Y-codes or Cost codes from EPS messages and correctly charge back to the correct healthcare service for both Primary Care and Secondary Care.
In October 2023, we deployed CLEO SOLO EPS to four North East London Trusts - Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, East London NHS Foundation Trust, and North East London NHS Foundation Trust – where we’ve been getting some really positive feedback. Sarla Drayan, Chief Pharmacist at Barking, Havering, and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust said: “There are many benefits of this new EPS. It helps streamline how patients get the medication they need following their hospital appointment, reduces clinician time spent managing manual prescriptions, and improves safety by reducing the risk of missing prescriptions.” We are also in pilot in Homerton at the moment and hoping to go live at Barts soon.
In August 2023, we launched the Health Care Professionals (HCP) portal app, which we developed with East of England Ambulance Service (EEAST) and our parent company, IC24. The portal - which is accessible on the Trust’s iPads - enables ambulance crews at EEAST in Norfolk and Waveney and Mid and South Essex to transfer patients directly to the NHS 111 service for support from primary care.
In July, Greenwich Health rolled out our Urgent Care solution, CLEO CORE UTC, at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich to manage the flow of patients at its Urgent Treatment Centre. Greenwich Health can now receive bookings from NHS 111, manage the waiting room, and clinically triage and refer patients seeking help. David James, CEO of Greenwich Health, said: “We did our due diligence in choosing CLEO Systems as our provider, having also looked at several other products. CLEO was a clear choice from our perspective. As well as being sensibly priced, the functionality and usability impressed our clinicians in particular.”
Collaborating with NHS England, we supported the pilot of a Digital Triage Platform, implementation of a national Paediatric CAS, and integrated our telephony to support implementation of the NHS 111 Single Virtual Contact Centre.
We’re also working on integrating with the digital ‘front door’ kiosk-based Streaming and Redirection solution from NHS Pathways. We’ve got several other deployments almost ready to roll out – so watch this space!
Tell us about CLEO Systems being selected for the UCL Centre for Digital Innovation (CDI) powered by AWS Impact Accelerator Programme?
We were really excited when CLEO Systems was selected to join Cohort 4 of the UCL Centre for Digital Innovation (CDI) powered by AWS Impact Accelerator Programme . This is a joint initiative between UCL and AWS to produce evidence-based, commercially sustainable technological innovations in healthcare and education, and we are working with UCL and AWS’s dedicated team to improve clinical and learning outcomes. We’re coming to the end of the programme and we’re looking forward to sharing all we’ve learned.
Sounds brilliant! What about the conferences you’ve been to over the past year?
The team has been out and about so much over the past year! Most recently, we’ve just visited Digital Health Rewired – an absolutely unmissable show. We had so many interesting conversations and we were also at HETT North in February, which was fantastic.
We were at the HETT Show in September and the Patient Flow Conference in October. It’s been a great experience getting out and about sharing our innovations and successes and hearing about others. We were also VIP sponsors at Urgent Health UK (https://www.urgenthealthuk.com/) this year, which was a fantastic opportunity to meet so many people.
We were also delighted to hear that techUK invited me to join the techUK Interoperability Working group, which is made up of experienced techUK members from the world of health and care technology. We are also now PRSB (Professional Record Standards body) partners, which uniquely represents clinical and social care. PRSB also provides independent evidence of CLEO's implementation of the standard with the PRSB quality mark, which is recognised by providers of health and care services. PRSB is working hand in hand with NHS procurement to ensure the mark is used as a criteria for procurement frameworks, including the new buying catalogues.
And what’s been going on more widely over the past year for healthcare technology?
So much has been going on in the world of digital technology – particularly in the Electronic Prescribing sphere and the Urgent Care sector. With trials across England this year for pharmacist independent prescribing services - there's lots more to come in 2024. In the Urgent Care sector, we’ve watched with interest the amazing work that’s going on at UHUK and the Warwick Innovation Centre, where the new UHUK Innovation Programme is collaborating on WMHWIN’s Open Innovation Programme method by solving challenges for Urgent Care with up to 10 partner companies.
Can you tell us what’s coming up for the rest of 2024 for CLEO Systems?
We have so much coming up! All I will say is watch this space for some exciting news in the coming months.
We are so proud of our team who continues to lead the way, delivering new and innovative approaches where benefits are reaped by patients and employees alike.
Notes and links:
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2024/03/midlands-partnership-and-cleo-collaborate-on-y-codes-within-eps/
www.digitalhealth.net/2023/11/cleo-systems-deploys-eps-to-four-north-east-london-trusts/
www.digitalhealth.net/2023/07/greenwich-health-chooses-cleo-systems-urgent-care-solution/