Medway launches digital platform to help scale virtual hospital

Medway NHS Foundation Trust has implemented a new digital platform as part of its strategy to scale its virtual hospital initiative. 

The trust partnered with health tech firm Feebris to launch the platform over a six-week period.

Jackie Hammond, head of nursing, virtual ward services at Medway, said: “Change fatigue is real in the NHS.

“The reason we selected Feebris as our partner for scale, after a careful selection process, was the configurability of the technology, their hands-on change management, willingness to jointly evolve processes and commitment to making the transition not just smooth, but energising.”

The trust’s surgical, medical, acute and recovery team (SMART), which covers virtual monitoring and hospital at home, support all clinical conditions from all specialties.

All patients admitted to the virtual ward are of an acuity level that would have otherwise required hospitalisation.

In one month after going live with the platform, Medway reported saving 1,500 bed days, with a day on the Medway virtual ward costing a third of a day in hospital.

Tracy Stocker, director of operations and senior responsible officer for the virtual ward programme (SMART) at Medway, said: “We’re not just delivering care at home.

“We’re building the systems, culture, and evidence base to support a truly distributed, data-driven and patient-centric virtual hospital.”

The trust says that it is also the first pilot site to successfully submit data to the federated data platform as part of NHSE’s move to a new minimum data set for virtual wards, which will replace the current daily situation reports and enable automated daily collection of pseudonymised data nationally.

Meanwhile, NHSE has commissioned an evaluation to measure the impact of its national virtual wards initiative.

The two-year project launched in February 2025 and will be carried out by Healthcare Integration Partners, Kaleidoscope, and City St George’s, University of London.