FDS Consultants has been selected as the new long-term IT partner to work alongside Primary Eyecare Services (PES) and deliver a new system that both parties hope will enable greater collaboration between primary care optical practices and hospital eye departments.
The new Opera platform integrates access to NHS systems in order to meet the needs of PES, local optical committees and optical practices.
Dharmesh Patel, CEO of PES, said: ‘Opera is a single, easy to use platform covering all providers and episodes of care including records, referrals and collaboration. It enables a revolution in collaboration allowing primary eye care practices to work more closely with hospital eye services, which will ultimately deliver better patient care.’
Functions of the system include NHS number look up, access to summary care records, e-referrals and feedback from hospital eye services, with further functionality to be added in the future. It also includes functionality for claims management and performance management of eye care services.
FDS Consultants was selected after its implementation of Opera for Covid-19 Urgent Eyecare Service (Cues) was deemed a success by PES.
PES and its partner organisations will transition to Opera over the next six months with a transition process that includes staff training.
Anne Lamb, director of operations at FDS Consultants, said: ‘Our experience in referral management and extended services provision in dentistry is very transferable to the optical sector and we were able to rapidly develop the Opera platform to enable the Cues service.
‘This has provided the foundation for a successful partnership with PES and we look forward to working in partnership to transition the organisation and its partners onto the broader platform and into the future as we add more functionality and capabilities.’
The current IT platform OptoManager, which is provided by Cegedim Rx, will be phased out after a decade of use in the optical sector.
Cues and beyond
Patel told Optician that practitioner feedback to Opera during the height of the pandemic had been positive. ‘At a practice level, processes have been streamlined to make Opera much more user friendly. Functionality like not having to input full patient details and integration with NHS search systems means that admin time is reduced.
‘The system evolved quickly and users have been using the feedback mechanism to say what works and what doesn’t – I’m sure it’s had its glitches, as you do with any new IT system but that’s part of the learning curve.’
Beyond Cues and the pandemic, Patel said Opera would have broad usage. ‘Every service we operate through PES. All of the referral filtering services for glaucoma, repeat measures, cataracts, pre-cataract pathways and some general referral platforms and pathways that we have in some parts of the country, as well as post op follow-up, glaucoma monitoring, low vision, children’s vision screenings. We hope that within six months, this will be the platform used across the organisation for all services.’
One of the expected benefits of the platform will be improved relationship between optical practices and hospital eye departments. ‘I think the key there is the two-way communication,’ says Patel. ‘When you speak to practitioners, what they will tell you is the thing they value most is feedback from the hospital on the referrals they make, or actually when they call the hospital to get some advice and guidance on a particular action they’re intending on taking.’
Improved communication could lead to more services being handed to optical practices and delivered on the high street. ‘For me, this is the really exciting part,’ says Patel. ‘IT has always been put up as a barrier to enabling more being done in primary care, but what Opera will do is break down a lot of those barriers. That could be integration with the hospital electronic patient record systems for post-cataract follow-up data or the ability for glaucoma cases to be reviewed virtually by consultants at the hospital. It really opens up a way for us to support the hospital sector, but also greater activity to be delivered in practice.’
