Totally Regulatory News (TLY)

28 Nov 2012 12:36

28 November 2012 AIM: TLY Totally PLC ("Totally", "the Company" or "the Group") Statement Re. New Contract Win

Totally announces the introduction of a new 12-month Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease ("COPD") health coaching service programme, working with Leicester City Clinical Commissioning Group ("CCG"). The health coaching service will provide for better health outcomes, reduced repeat admissions and cost savings in an environment where £7 out of every £10 of NHS spending is currently used for the management of long term conditions.

Totally Health, a subsidiary of the Company, will provide Leicester City's selected COPD patients with a two way health coaching service that will support the local care pathway and local primary and acute care providers. The health coaches are registered nurses who help the patient manage their condition by providing mentoring and support via phone calls and tele-health monitoring.

Wendy Norton, Head of Health Coaching, Totally Health, commented:

"Health coaching for long term condition management puts the patient at the centre of the process. People with long term conditions can feel overwhelmed by the condition and its associated treatments: one of the values of health coaching is that at all times clients feel involved and in control which improves self-esteem and can elevate self-efficacy. It also becomes easier for an individual to identify when things are starting to go wrong so that they can be supported to take immediate appropriate action rather than waiting until the situation has worsened, requiring medical intervention or hospitalisation which could potentially be avoided."

Emma-Jane Roberts, Programme Manager, Leicester City CCG, commented:

"We want to be able to give our patients access to qualified, specialist advice services so we can shift the balance and focus from a model that responds to illness to one, which promotes health and well-being. Health coaching programmes are proven to support people to engage in behaviour change for chronic disease prevention, chronic condition self-management and rehabilitation. In doing our research, we identified Totally Health as the only company who can offer health coaching the way we want and tailor-made to our local care pathways."

Currently, a single unscheduled hospital admission through A&E at the CCG's current Payment by Results tariff is £4,066. The number of patients recruited to the COPD wider change management programme had an average of 3.49 unscheduled hospital admissions during the previous 12 months.

Totally Health's health coaching service is built upon proven research methods, which can be seen in a trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine2010 by Dr David Wennberg and colleagues. The study looked at 174,120 subjects to assess the effect of telephone care-management strategy on medical costs and resource utilisation. The primary outcome measures at the end of 12 months were total medical costs and the number of hospital admissions. The results of the study demonstrated that the intervention reduced hospital admission by 10.1%, creating significant cost savings.

Totally Health's health coaching service is also being used to deliver the Shared Decision Making programme under the QIPP Right Care Programme. Leicester City CCG's COPD health coaching programme will utilise the `LUCY' system for long term condition management, combined with access to a COPD Patient Decision Aid (PDA) currently being developed by Totally Health.

Commenting on the strategic vision for Leicester City CCG's COPD change management programme, Emma-Jane Roberts adds:

"We envisage these patients continuing with health coaching beyond their clinical need for the telehealth system and we see it integrating into the management of the long-term condition. The health coaching service shall provide the continuity for these patients to ensure that they maintain the improved self-management of their condition. It is known that many 'severe' COPD patients will have co-morbidities. A real advantage of dovetailing the health coaching into the tele-health scheme and beyond, is that it would be a service that could offer true patient-centred care for those who have several long-term conditions."

Wendy Lawrence, Managing Director, Totally Health, concludes:

"Totally Health is really pleased to be supporting Leicester City CCG's Innovation Programme. We believe that our services will make a real difference to the patients involved in the Programme. We will be working closely with the patients, their GPs, Carers and other health professionals to ensure a seamless service is provided that brings about real improvements in day to day life."

Further enquiries:Totally PLC Clare Thompson, CEO 020 7284 5587 Merchant Securities Limited Lindsay Mair / Simon Clements 020 7628 2200Notes to Editors

Leicester City CCG is one of the emerging organisations that will take over responsibility for local healthcare commissioning in April 2013 and is in the first wave of CCGs awaiting authorisation. It brings together 64 GP practices across the city, representing a total of 360,000 patients. The CCG has a series of strategic objectives, one of which is the management of COPD, and has been working in partnership with the local acute trust, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and also a community trust, Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, in a three way partnership as part of a wider COPD change management programme.

The CCG identified a case for a health coaching trial, which will also operate in parallel with a COPD telehealth scheme. Through risk stratification methodology Leicester City CCG has selected patients who are at greatest risk of repeated hospital admissions, many of whom also have co-morbities, but who also would benefit from monitoring and advice from qualified care providers within the community and achieve a better quality of life.

About Totally Health

Totally Health was established to provide digital solutions to the challenges of healthcare, focusing on long-term condition management. It is a subsidiary of AIM listed Totally Plc, and the sister company of Totally Communications, a bespoke software development and digital marketing agency.

Totally Health works closely with NHS Policy makers, to ensure that its services meet the needs of clients such as Health Authorities (HAs), Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), GP Practices, Community Services Providers, Foundation Trusts and of course Patients.

Totally Health was recently appointed by NHS Midlands and East, as a preferred bidder to provide services for Lot 1 of Phase 4 of the Shared Decision Making, "SDM", project which required the development of a suite of 37 patient decision aids and associated telephone support.

The "SANDY" IT system that the SDM project is built on, sits within the secure N3 environment and will carry patient identifiable data. As outlined in the Department of Health's information strategy (Case Study: Page 59), the system will be linked up via APIs to databases across the primary care (e.g. EMIS) and secondary care (E.G. Renal patient view) sectors.

The Totally Health management team has over 100 years' experience of working with systems in the NHS. The management team is comprised of ex Bupa Health Dialog employees who themselves have delivered many NHS change programmes and complex patient engagement programmes for many Long Term Conditions, along with whole community wide system change for pathway redesign and pharmaceutical products.

About Wendy Norton

Wendy is a registered Nurse with over 25 years of experience in both public and private practice areas. Working initially in Intensive Care and Surgical Directorates, Wendy has led several programmes delivering Shared Decision Making or Long Term Condition Management through Health Coaching, working with both private and NHS patients.

Wendy has been involved in Health Coaching since 2001 when she travelled to New Hampshire USA to undertake training in Health Coaching and SDM with the team at Health Dialog US. This training was adapted from that developed by the FIMDM and had been in regular use in the US for some time. On her return to the UK Wendy set up and ran an SDM programme for patients with BUC and BPH.

Following on from that Wendy did a further training course in advanced techniques in Health Coaching in 2004, visiting the coaching centre in the US again as a part of this learning, and went onto set up and run a Health Coaching service for NHS patients as part of a Long Term Condition management programme commissioned by the PCT.

In 2008 Wendy went onto transition the small coaching centre in Cambridge into a much bigger site in Manchester where Health Coaching programmes were centrally serviced for patients from several PCT's around the country. She recruited and trained additional staff for this expansion and continued to manage the multi-focal coaching operation at a Senior Management level for a further 12 months.

Wendy joined Totally Health at the end of 2011 and participated in the bid to win the contract for the National SDM programme. Since then she has built a remote Health Coaching service, a process which included recruitment and training of staff, providing expertise on the IS requirements to support the service, co-ordination with the programme board during the set up phase and involvement on the Medical Advisory Groups in support of the development of the PDA's.