Innovation

Suvera

2023 | Will Gao

Suvera is a Care Quality Commission registered virtual clinic that currently supports almost 100 General Practices to proactively manage patients with long-term conditions. Suvera’s full clinical team utilises in house technology featuring an integrated patient web application and a clinical dashboard to optimise patient outcomes at scale.

The challenge
Primary care is under significant pressure. An extra 10% of consultations were delivered in 2022 despite there being 850 fewer GPs. This increase in demand is exacerbated further by our growing ageing population living with multiple comorbidities. Twenty-six million people in England live with at least one chronic condition with this figure growing year on year. Fifty percent of all appointments in primary care are for chronic diseases and therefore 70% of all NHS expenditure are for long term condition (LTC) related illnesses.

Each preventable stroke caused by poor control of high blood pressure costs the NHS £45,000 in the first year alone, from A+E admission, to MDT (multi-disciplinary team) support and rehabilitation. Therefore, by investing in proactive preventative healthcare in chronic disease management, there are significant cost savings to the system. For every patient with hypertension that has 10mmHg better control of their systolic blood pressure, there is a £50,000 net saving to the system according to Public Health England.

The solution

Suvera is a UK-based, CQC and NHS Digital approved virtual clinical service, empowering clinicians and patients to remotely monitor and manage LTC, particularly hypertension, a key contributor to cardiovascular disease. The proprietary technology helps GP practices streamline the management of these conditions, releasing appointments, increasing efficacy, and enhancing early detection and prevention. This ensures that more care can be delivered to patients with fewer clinical resources.

Usable through app (web and mobile), SMS messaging, email, and/or telephone, and integrable with EMIS and SystmOne (two of the largest health record systems in primary care), the Suvera service provides both clinicians and the technology for General Practice to:

Book, manage, and create pre-booked proactive telephone appointments.
Request and share clinical data and supplementary information (blood pressure readings, personalised follow-up plans, lifestyle questionnaires, etc.).
Issue and manage prescriptions.

Suvera is unique to primary care in that it delivers a full CQC regulated clinical team, with data analysts and care-coordinators that is under its own governance structure that utilises interoperable technology to deliver population based proactive care that standardises the level of care to General Practice.

The impact

The Virtual Clinic on reduces patients systolic blood pressure by 10-15 mmHg within the first three months of being enrolled on the programme.
The Virtual Clinic, utilising its proprietary pre-booking system achieves an average of 85% engagement across all demographic IMD deciles.
A clinician utilising Suvera’s platform can manage a 31% greater patient register than one without access to Suvera’s technology platform.

Source: based on internal data

For more information, visit: https://www.suvera.org.uk/