SCOTTISH entrepreneur David Sibbald's Aridhia Informatics venture has developed an app aimed at reducing the number of patients readmitted to hospital within 30 days.
Aridhia is now inviting National Health Service trusts in England to take advantage of the technology.
The firm noted that, since 2011, more than £390 million had been withheld from English hospital budgets under a policy which penalises a hospital if a person is readmitted within 30 days. It said its new app for doctors could help them improve patient outcomes and ease the budgets of NHS England hospitals by predicting the risk of readmissions.
Aridhia added: "With the new app, it will take doctors less than two minutes to predict a risk of readmission that may be avoided if an intervention is deployed accordingly, potentially saving their hospital thousands of pounds as well as improving patient outcomes."
The PARR30 "community edition" app, which is being made available through Aridhia's community programme, calculates risk through a predictive mathematical model developed by the Nuffield Trust using an anonymised 10 per cent sample of all NHS England hospital admissions between April 2008 and 2009.
Aridhia said the app was easy to use in real-time and by the bedside. It processes 17 pieces of information which can be obtained from hospital information systems or a patient's notes.
These include the date of birth of a patient, detail on recent admissions, and diagnosis of any major health conditions. The app takes into account 11 major conditions drawn from the "Charlson co-morbidity index".
Aridhia is inviting interested NHS trusts in England to register their details and become a "key partner in the translation of research into clinical practice". It is also offering a "trust edition" of the app, a paid-for service which allows trusts to localise the scoring algorithm, using additional data to calibrate and personalise PARR-30 to a specific hospital.
The customer base of Aridhia, which has created a software platform to enable analysis of large amounts of health-related data to support treatment of patients, includes NHS Scotland. NHS Scotland has been using Aridhia's platform to help track the treatment of cancer patients and to analyse data relating to patients who are on complex mixes of medication for multiple chronic conditions.
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