£3m fund to help recover primary care backlogs
Commissioners can request immediate support for GPs to help mitigate risks in long-term conditions management
Support overburdened practices with home kidney testing
Under current circumstances, thousands of patients at increased cardiovascular risk aren’t completing vital annual health checks like the ACR kidney health urine test for people with diabetes – and the new NHS Operational Planning Guidance is urging systems to respond with a recovery plan.
£3m funding is available now to subsidise home testing for patients, helping to ensure these risks continue to be mitigated. The service takes less than an hour to set-up with GP practices, then the home testing team will work on closing the backlogs, allowing GPs to continue with everything else.
This nationally significant programme, announced by the Department of Health and Social Care, is commissioned for delivery by Healthy.io in partnership with NHSx, the NHS Accelerated Access Collaborative and the National Institute for Health Research.
100,000 untested at-risk patients have now returned a test using Minuteful Kidney home testing, in CCGs which are already using this funded support as a way of maintaining safe infrastructure despite additional current pressures.
Across the country, almost 2m people have still not completed an ACR test as part of their annual diabetes review, increasing the likelihood of heart attacks, heart failure, kidney failure, strokes and unplanned hospital admissions.
Key benefits
- Immediate funded support to restore services and reduce COVID backlogs
- Help manage ongoing conditions in line with the new NHS Operational Planning Guidance
- No fuss, quick and easy implementation - set up the service in your practice in under one hour
- Outsourced support removes the need for practice staff to organise ACR tests or process urine samples in practice
- Improves timely access to primary care for vulnerable and hard-to-reach patients - test from home, no GP appointment
- Helps prevent cardiovascular events like heart attacks, heart failure, kidney failure and strokes
- Abnormal results flagged for quick follow-up and integrated into SystmOne / EMIS
Send
We send ACR test kits directly to eligible patients' homes with their prior consent
Test
Patients self-test using our test kit and smartphone app, which guides them easily
Review
Results are analysed and uploaded to SystmOne or EMIS workflows in real time
Retest
Abnormal results are flagged and another kit is sent to patient for retesting
Clinical-grade testing from home
Minuteful Kidney is helping to make home testing the new normal, in line with the new NHS Operational Planning Guidance. Commissioners are now exploiting the potential of digital technologies to transform the delivery of care and patient outcomes
Home testing uses the same point of care dipsticks as lab testing and generates equivalent results. It measures semi quantitative analysis of microalbumin (10 – 150 mg/L), creatinine (10 – 300mg/dL) and albumin to creatinine ratio (mg/g).
Results are expressed as ACR normal (<30mg/g), ACR abnormal (30-300mg/g) or ACR high abnormal (>300mg/g).
The product is CE marked, GDPR compliant, and follows industry standards for privacy and safety.
found the test 'easy' or 'very
easy' to use
preferred testing at home
vs. testing at the clinic
would recommend this service
to a friend
Get funding now
Securing support is quick and simple – just complete this request form and you will receive an immediate response to discuss next steps. This NHS England programme provides funding to match any investment into home ACR testing made by local health systems. £3m remains for deployments which will support primary care recovery in the last quarter of 21/22 and the NHS funds are directly available through Healthy.io, the commissioned providers of the home testing service.
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- Judith Shore, Michelle Green, Andrew Hardy & Deborah Livesey (2019): The compliance and cost-effectiveness of smartphone urinalysis albumin screening for people with diabetes in England, Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research, DOI: 10.1080/14737167.2019.1650024
