Overview

Medway NHS Foundation Trust has launched a new digital platform aimed at enhancing its virtual hospital initiative. This development is part of the trust’s broader strategy to improve healthcare delivery.

Partnership with Feebris

• The trust collaborated with health tech company Feebris to implement the platform over a six-week timeline.
• Jackie Hammond, head of nursing for virtual ward services at Medway, emphasized the importance of selecting Feebris due to their technology’s configurability and effective change management.

Virtual Ward Services

The trust’s Surgical, Medical, Acute, and Recovery Team (SMART) oversees virtual monitoring and hospital-at-home services, catering to all clinical conditions across various specialties.

• Patients admitted to the virtual ward typically require a level of care that would otherwise necessitate hospitalization.
• In the month following the platform’s launch, Medway reported a savings of 1,500 bed days, with costs for a day on the virtual ward being only a third of those in a hospital setting.

Future Goals

Tracy Stocker, director of operations and senior responsible officer for the virtual ward program, stated, “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.”

Data Submission and Evaluation

Medway is also the first pilot site to successfully submit data to the federated data platform as part of NHS England’s initiative to establish a new minimum data set for virtual wards. This will replace the current daily situation reports and facilitate automated daily collection of pseudonymized data on a national scale.

Additionally, NHS England has commissioned a two-year evaluation project to assess the impact of its national virtual wards initiative, which began in February 2025 and will be conducted by Healthcare Integration Partners, Kaleidoscope, and City St George’s, University of London.