Open Medical platform to support occupational therapy in Moray

The Rural Centre of Excellence for Digital Health and Care (RCE) in Moray, Scotland, has partnered with Open Medical to create a digital triage pathway for occupational therapy services.

Clinical workflow management specialists Open Medical, began working on a referral management plan with the RCE in November 2024, as part of a research and development scheme to help transform the community’s occupational therapy service.

Open Medical will use its PATHPOINT referral management platform to improve the quality of information in referrals to the service and determine the priority of requests, with the aim of reducing the amount of time that occupational therapists spend chasing and assessing referrals.

The RCE is a £5 million project funded by the UK Government and managed and delivered by the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI), with the aim of advancing Scotland’s digital health agenda.

Marie Simpson, programme manager at DHI, and occupational therapist, said: “We are raising the profile of the Moray region as a hot spot for digital companies that want to develop and test their ideas and innovation for health and social care.

“We have partnerships in place with the public sector and citizens to act as a test bed for innovation. This project is a great example of how we work in practice.

“The local occupational therapy service, managed by Health & Social Care Moray, has been experiencing a rise in requests for support, so we looked at the pathway and at where digital could help.

“Now, we are working with Open Medical to improve the service model – improving the quality of referrals and triaging them automatically.”

The work, which is expected to continue throughout the summer of 2025, will include integration with self-assessment and digital assessment tools to support self-management and help reduce waiting times.

Open Medical and the DHI held workshops with occupational therapists to understand the challenges and what they wanted from a new innovative digitally enabled service.

The company has integrated its PATHPOINT referral management platform with the Mydex CIC personal data store – an R&D project at RCE that makes it easier for patients to upload information about themselves and share it with local health and care and third sector services.

Dr Tim Hoogenboom, head of research at Open Medical, said: “Our own approach to research and development is always to start by getting a real understanding of workflow, and we have really enjoyed collaborating with the DHI and the occupational therapy team in Moray to determine how our referral management toolkit can evolve.”

The new referral pathway will be tested with trial users, before the system is refined and a decision is made on whether to adopt it permanently.

If the project is successful, Open Medical plans to commercialise the work to create a new occupational therapy product.

Meanwhile in March 2024, an RCE health technology project on the generation and collation of social determinants of health data, was named best up and coming TEC innovation at the International Technology Care Awards 2024.