UK healthcare organization Salford Royal, a part of the National Health Service, is working with Validic to integrate patient generated health data into their electronic health records into their system.

Salford Royal serves some 220,000 UK residents across Manchester and is considered one of the NHS’s most digitally advanced trusts. The health system recently received over $12 million (10 million British pounds) to build out their digital capabilities, with a large focus on remote monitoring. Using Validic’s data connectivity platform, Salford Royal will integrate patient-generated health data from wearables, in-home medical devices and consumer health apps to identify how that data can lead to better outcomes in patient care as well as cost reductions.

While Validic has other customers in the UK, this partnership with an NHS entity marks a new level of impact for the company.

“We are tremendously excited for this partnership because Salford Royal is a banner institution within the NHS and they have a lot of really innovative ideas,” Validic CEO Drew Schiller told MobiHealthNews in an interview. "There is also a broad population focus, so there is a lot of big thinking behind how this could scale up." 

The initiative will start by integrating fitness and sleep data into Salford Royal’s EHR and evaluate its use and value into workflows and patient care. Over time, the health system will bring in more data streams from Validic’s platform, which connects to over 400 devices and applications.

Researchers and clinicians will analyze the aggregated data for trends, correlations and causations as the pilot gets underway, with the goal of offering doctors insight into how a patient’s lifestyle is affecting their health. For example, they may be able to correlate sleep and heart rate data to identify new ways to manage weight or diabetes.

“As we are talking about the data coming from these devices, it’s been striking that there is this totally different conceptual model of care – the traditional model is very encounter-focused, but data from wearables or in-home medical devices is continuous,” Schiller said. “So, the concept of the patient encounter is really starting to fade away as you get into these remote monitoring programs using patient-generated health data.”

Salford Royal wasn’t available to speak about the initiative, but Schiller said the overall mission is to establish a preventive care model using patientgenerated health data. Working with an NHS health system offers the unique ability to focus on preventive care, Schiller said, as well as the potential to impact a wider ranging patient population compared to individual health systems in the US.

“One of the things that is obvious about the NHS is, given that they cover the entire country, there is more of a focus on value-based care and payment system inherent to the care model, and that gives an interesting perspective of how to prevent illness,” Schiller said. “Challenges we have here in the US is that our model is very much episodic-based care, and where Salford is using our platform and working on developing preventive care and keeping people healthy, that really lines up with some of the work we are trying to do here in different capacities.”

For example, Schiller said, Validic’s initiatives with Kaiser Permanente or Sutter Health that are designed to integrate patient-generated health data into health system workflows to create preventive and chronic condition management methods mirror what Salford is trying to ultimately do system-wide.
 
“There are a lot of nice things about this project – its fairly straightforward technology, so we can also easily see things like clinical workflow integration and how to make it frictionless for all people involved, and Salford Royal is a banner NHS entity where, once they nail something a prove a value and improve patient care, it’s something that will usually get adopted system-wide,” Schiller said.