Reducing pathway costs with virtual wards
Extend care beyond hospital walls through virtual wards and remote monitoring, enabling patients to be safely monitored and managed at home while staying connected to clinical teams.
Configurable digital care pathways guide care teams on when patients can be treated locally and when escalation to specialist services is needed, helping reduce avoidable hospital visits and easing pressure on tertiary centres.
Care teams can design and adapt pathways for virtual wards, chronic monitoring, and referral triage without replacing existing systems, making it easier to standardise care models and scale them across sites.
Solutions integrated with vitagroup HIP:
Big Picture Medical platform
A configurable platform for designing, deploying, and managing virtual wards, remote monitoring programmes, and referral triage pathways across services and regions.
Key benefits:
- Reduces unnecessary tertiary referrals by up to 54% in reported programmes
- Lowers costs across clinical pathways by around 33%
- Shortens time to deploy or adapt care pathways, often from months to days
- Frees up clinicians time by enabling more care to be managed safely closer to home
- Improves coordination between community, hospital, and clinical teams through shared digital pathways
Key features:
- No‑code care‑workflow builder for virtual wards, chronic monitoring, and referral triage
- Configurable digital pathways spanning local providers, diagnostic clinics, and tertiary centres
- Support for remote monitoring data and virtual consultations within the same pathway logic
- Analytics and reporting to track pathway performance, referral patterns, and escalation triggers
Current usecases
Supports virtual wards (e.g. heart failure, respiratory, post operative, hospital at home, and wound/burns), chronic disease monitoring (e.g. hepatitis, epilepsy, diabetes, chronic kidney disease), and referral triage pathways across different settings. One of the deployments is with University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust for Remote monitoring and risk based IBD care.