Open Medical, a health technology company founded and led by practising NHS healthcare professionals, provides tailored, cloud-based software solutions for healthcare organisations. Established by Dr. Harry Lykostratis, an orthopaedic surgeon and software engineer, Open Medical focuses on transforming clinical and operational workflows from referral to discharge across various specialties.
Open Medical approached Health Tech Enterprise (HTE) to help scale its award-winning teledermatology platform, Pathpoint eDerma, into a community-based diagnostic model. Their goal was to demonstrate the real-world impact of the tool in reducing patient waiting times compared to the current standard of care. This demonstration was crucial for securing broader adoption of the technology and showcasing its potential for nationwide implementation.
Read the interview with Piyush Mahapatra, Chief Innovation Officer to find out more:
Piyush Mahapatra, Chief Innovation Office, Open Medical
“At Open Medical, we’re tackling the longstanding issue of fragmented care. We provide clinicians with quick access to concise patient information while eliminating the inefficiencies of manual processes. Clinicians often need to make rapid decisions about numerous patient referrals within a short timeframe. Our technology steps in to handle the bulk of the workload. We manage the entire workflow process, organise patient cohorts, replace traditional tools like whiteboards and Excel sheets, and integrate various communication tools into one cohesive platform.
We are very clinically focused, which means we’ve got a real understanding of the operational challenges that the ground level faces. This insight drives our solutions, ensuring they meet real-world needs. Recognising the need to evolve alongside technology, we provide clinicians with quick access to all relevant patient information while eliminating the inefficiencies of manual processes. Our technology is a zero-footprint platform. This allows us to be very fast and adaptable.
Our technology
Our goal is to simplify clinical pathways, which vary widely across different medical specialties. Our technology is designed to be flexible enough to adapt to these needs. Take dermatology, for instance. A great example of this is our collaboration with Health Tech Enterprise (HTE). We already had an existing product in this area, and our latest project involved scaling it into a community-based diagnostic model.
In cancer, fast turnaround times are crucial. By streamlining workflows, our Pathpoint eDerma technology speeds up decision-making, ensuring patients receive timely care when they need it. When a patient presents with suspected skin cancer at their local GP, high-quality images are captured right there in the practice. These images, along with additional clinical information, are then sent to the dermatologist. From there, a consolidated triage decision is made, whether it’s proceeding straight to testing or providing a definitive diagnosis and outlining the subsequent steps for management. For patients, this means shorter wait times and quicker access to care. For clinicians, it means more time devoted to caring for patients.
Impacts
As a very clinically focused company, we’ve always recognised the need for robust evidence. With us, there’s a particular focus around health economics and financial evidence, which is a real driver for using our solutions because we can demonstrate significant impact. That’s where our partnership with HTE has been really helpful.
We were proud to be one of the winners of the NHS Cancer Programme’s innovation open call, which we won for our community diagnostic project in cancer. Working closely with the HTE team, we conducted a comprehensive health economic analysis to understand the real-world implications and benefits of our project. We also did some really interesting work on waiting list simulation to help assess and showcase Pathpoint eDerma’s effectiveness in reducing patient wait times.
Our partnership has really helped crystallise those benefits and communicate that effectively out, which has helped with scale and broader implementation. By focusing on clinical needs and providing intuitive, user-friendly solutions, we’ve successfully scaled our technology across numerous NHS sites, addressing a previously underserved area of healthcare technology.
Outcomes
Our work together has allowed us to successfully demonstrate the real-world impact and health economic benefits of our solution. This evidence played a pivotal role in securing an Integrated Care System (ICS)-wide contract in East Lancashire South Cumbria, helping transition from a trust-based model to a more scalable ICS-based model.
At the start of this project, patients were enduring lengthy wait times, with some waiting for 8 to 10 weeks to be seen despite the 2-Week-Wait (2WW) target. However, we managed to dramatically reduce this wait time to just 5.6 days on average within less than a month after the project’s launch.
The implementation of eDerma has also led to significant time savings for dermatologists, with assessments now taking an average of 5.5 minutes – almost four times faster than traditional in-person appointments. This increased efficiency has boosted capacity by nearly 80%. In addition, health economic evaluations have revealed that eDerma resulted in a £45 saving per consultation compared to face-to-face appointments. These substantial time and cost savings have allowed resources to be redirected to areas of critical need.
In East Kent, the project has addressed access barriers, providing access to care where it was previously lacking. The initiative is live across five imaging hubs, serving 700,000 people in areas with high demand. Notably, individuals from more deprived areas have reported significant benefits from the service, indicating improved equity in access to care.”
Working with HTE to generate real-world validation in clinical settings has been invaluable for us. It’s been a really positive experience. They’ve been flexible in their approach, extremely experienced in the field, and their outputs, including financial modelling and waiting list simulation, have been critical in helping us scale our solution across to a national level. As a result of these successes, we have successfully expanded our operations to 170 NHS sites in England and have also started exporting to three countries worldwide.
