The advent of Community Diagnostic Centres is welcome. But without their integration into pathways, systems and patients will struggle to benefit. Innovative Scottish company Lenus Health has evidenced a better way, using its plug-in digital diagnostic pathways to coordinate and automate the patient diagnostic journey from referral to treatment plan.
Access to timely and effective elective diagnostic services is critical to providing high-quality care, reducing waiting times for treatment and future hospitalisation.
Current approaches to diagnosing chronic diseases such as heart failure, COPD and asthma remain unsatisfactory, dispersed across medical specialties and healthcare settings.
However, the rollout of Community Diagnostic Centres (CDCs) and the recent strengthening of guidance on improving GP Direct Access to diagnostic services represents a major step forward in addressing the diagnostics waiting times challenge.
To capitalise on these developments, these resources must be fully integrated within transformed diagnostic pathways.
If not, there is a risk that CDCs will simply feed more capacity into existing dysfunctional pathways that are fragmented and complex for patients to navigate, particularly those with multi-morbidity.
Wider statistics reveal the growing scale of the problem.
