vMDT: Transforming how the NHS delivers joined-up care

Discover how vMDT helps healthcare teams work across organisational boundaries to enable faster, more joined-up, patient-centred care.

Healthcare is increasingly delivered by teams of professionals working across organisational boundaries. Yet while the NHS aspires to be more integrated, with neighbourhood-based care, the systems and processes supporting these teams often remain fragmented.

vMDT is a digitally enabled clinical coordination platform developed by GP and clinical leader Dr Majid Akram to help healthcare professionals work together more effectively.

By connecting professionals and supporting coordinated clinical workflows across existing services, vMDT aims to make care more timely, joined-up and patient-centred.

What is vMDT and what problem does it solve?

Patients with complex needs often require input from multiple professionals, including GPs, community nurses, pharmacists, hospital specialists and social care teams. Although these services are expected to work together, they frequently operate across different organisations, clinical systems and communication processes. This can lead to delayed clinical decisions, duplicated work, fragmented communication and uncertainty about who is responsible for the next stage of a patient’s care.

vMDT addresses this by providing the digital infrastructure needed to coordinate multidisciplinary working, rather than relying on disconnected referrals, emails, telephone calls and meetings.

Through the primary care electronic patient record, clinicians refer selected patients to a multidisciplinary team (MDT), and vMDT builds a case for individual patients using existing patient information, reducing the need to manually gather and re-enter clinical details. The platform supports MDT scheduling, structured clinical discussions, recording decisions, allocating and tracking actions, and referring patients into agreed clinical pathways.

Following an MDT discussion, a structured summary can be transmitted back to the patient’s primary care record, supporting continuity and ensuring that decisions are communicated to the wider clinical team.

Importantly, vMDT is not another electronic patient record. It provides a clinical coordination and workflow layer that works alongside existing systems, enabling professionals to collaborate while maintaining the established clinical records. This creates a shared, structured and auditable record of MDT discussions, decisions and actions, helping reduce duplication, improve accountability and make better use of the expertise already available across the NHS.

The Lincolnshire heart failure MDT experience has demonstrated the potential of this approach, enabling more patients to receive timely specialist input and supporting more efficient multidisciplinary working.

What was your inspiration and motivation?

As a practising GP, Majid has seen first-hand the challenges faced by patients whose care depends on multiple professionals and organisations working together. He understands the frustrations of delayed specialist advice, fragmented communication, repeated referrals and uncertainty about who is responsible for the next step in a patient’s journey.

His motivation was not to develop technology for its own sake, but to address a problem he experienced in everyday clinical practice: patients waiting for care when the expertise needed to help them was often already available somewhere within the NHS.

Alongside his frontline clinical experience, Majid has held senior clinical leadership roles within Lincolnshire ICB, giving him a broader understanding of how organisational boundaries, different clinical systems and established ways of working can make genuine integration difficult. Through his work developing integrated heart failure pathways in Lincolnshire, he helped bring together GPs, clinical pharmacists, community heart failure nurses and hospital specialists.

The experience highlighted that the challenge was not always a lack of clinical capacity, but how effectively the NHS organised and connected the expertise it already had. For example, arranging rehabilitation for a patient with heart failure could previously involve multiple communications and administrative steps. Within an agreed integrated pathway, vMDT can support a more direct referral process, with decisions and actions recorded and coordinated through the platform. A click can now send a request to the Cardiac rehabilitation team to contribute to a patients care. 

For Majid, vMDT represents an opportunity to redesign how multidisciplinary care is delivered, making collaboration more efficient, accountable and scalable.

Although heart failure was one of the first pathways to benefit, the platform is also being used to support neighbourhood MDT working, with potential applications across diabetes, respiratory care, frailty, cardiometabolic and renal prevention, virtual wards and Hospital at Home.

Why did you become a fellow?

For Majid, joining the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) was about moving from demonstrating that vMDT could work successfully within Lincolnshire to understanding how it could be adopted more widely across the NHS. However, Majid recognised that developing a successful clinical innovation and achieving sustainable adoption across multiple NHS organisations are two very different challenges.

The barriers to wider adoption are not necessarily clinical. They include commissioning and procurement, organisational readiness, information governance, interoperability, funding and the challenges of changing established ways of working.

The NIA has provided an opportunity to understand these challenges, strengthen the evidence base and develop a more sustainable model for adoption.

It has also provided access to senior NHS leaders, subject matter experts and a community of innovators who understand the realities of scaling healthcare innovation.

For Majid, one of the most valuable aspects has been the opportunity to learn from others, challenge his own thinking and develop the skills needed to move from being a clinician who has developed an innovation to someone who can lead its adoption at scale.

Alongside the practical support, the NIA has helped raise vMDT’s profile beyond Lincolnshire and opened conversations with potential partners and other NHS systems. It is helping him think about vMDT not simply as a digital product, but as a scalable clinical operating model that can contribute to the NHS’s ambitions for neighbourhood health, integrated care and improved productivity.

Looking ahead

Majid’s ambition is to take vMDT from an innovation developed in Lincolnshire to an established, scalable solution adopted across multiple NHS systems.

Over the coming years, he wants to see vMDT supporting a wider range of clinical pathways, including heart failure, neighbourhood health, frailty, respiratory care and Hospital at Home.

The ambition is to establish a reusable digital infrastructure for integrated care, allowing different clinical pathways to benefit from a consistent approach to multidisciplinary collaboration, decision-making and accountability.

Success will not simply be measured by the number of NHS organisations adopting vMDT. For Majid, it will be about demonstrating measurable improvements in patient care, clinical productivity and the way professionals work together.

On a personal level, he hopes to continue developing as a clinical innovator and leader, combining his frontline experience as a GP with a deeper understanding of digital transformation, innovation adoption and healthcare entrepreneurship. He also hopes to use his experience to support other frontline clinicians who have ideas for improving healthcare but may not know how to develop and scale them.

Want to find out more? Visit the innovation page where you can contact the innovator directly, or check out their website.