London-based Accelerate has partnered with Elemental Software to offer social prescribing services to thousands of patients with chronic wound and Lymphedema care needs whose long-term conditions impact their daily lives.
City and Hackney CCG will be the first location for this service and will serve as a pilot, with plans for the further roll out of the Elemental platform by Accelerate across other areas this year. More than 200 patients at City and Hackney CCG will be involved.
Social prescribing is a method of referring people towards non-medical sources of support within the community to help them improve their overall wellbeing, via a social prescribing link worker. This can include activities like art and fitness classes, fishing, gardening clubs, and healthy cooking programmes.
Elemental’s digital social prescribing platform enables organisations to scale and measure social prescribing initiatives and is the only full end-to-end social prescribing management platform available.
Alison Hopkins, CEO of Accelerate, said, “Accelerate has long been committed to the role of the patient in the successful management of their care and condition. We believe this partnership with Elemental and the patients we serve takes us on the next stage of our journey with our patients.
“Not only does this approach recognise the importance of the individual in coming to terms with how to manage their personal health, it also meets the needs of the changing health and social care environment as we move to the 21st century approach to population health management. We are excited to start on this journey with Elemental.”
Jennifer Neff, CEO of Elemental Software, commented, “We are delighted to be partnering with Accelerate to not only help enhance the great work they are doing in wound and lymphedema care, but also allow them to strengthen connections with community providers and better report on and evidence the impacts that their support has on patients.
“Accelerate’s work has a massive impact on the lives of their patients, in helping them manage their long-term health conditions and enabling them to live fulfilling lives and we feel that our digital social prescribing platform will further boost the effectiveness of their programme and empower patients in the long term.”
Alison Hopkins, CEO of Accelerate, continues: “Accelerate understands that, for its patients, living with a complex wound, debilitating swelling or limited mobility changes the way they experience the world around them. We work with patients to better enable them to manage their health issues in often life-changing ways.”
Through the partnership with Elemental, Accelerate aims to provide patients in London with further resources that will take a more holistic approach to their care and quality of life, contributing significantly to their long-term wellbeing.
A key reason for the partnership was the ability to track and analyse the impact the social prescribing programme has on the care and overall wellbeing of patients. Through the Elemental platform, Accelerate will assess and record a patients needs and follow their progress through the assigned interventions to the conclusion of their treatment and assessment. This will enable them to evidence the full impact on the programme and provide the case for its extension, where necessary for an individual’s wellbeing.
Accelerate will be using MYCaW, a questionnaire by Elemental’s partners Meaningful Measures, to understands individual patients and ensure a holistic, personalised approach to their support. It captures the full range of concerns encountered in social prescribing such as their psycho-emotional, social, physical, spiritual and medical concerns, as well as practical welfare concerns relating to finance, housing and jobs and concerns of carers.
