A simpler, more connected way to manage social prescribing, RIVIAM launches Social Prescribing Hub

RIVIAM Digital Care has launched a Social Prescribing Hub, co-designed with Nuneaton & Bedworth Primary Care Network (PCN) in the West Midlands.

Nuneaton & Bedworth PCN provide services for over 100,000 patients across 11 GP practices. 

Built around how multi-disciplinary social prescribing teams actually work, the hub brings referrals, triage, caseloads, diary and appointments, outcomes, tasks and access to a local service directory in one secure digital place.

For PCNs looking for an optimal digital social prescribing solution

Feedback from the PCN was clear: their existing digital service was making it unnecessarily difficult for both the PCN and GP practices to deliver joined-up working and personalised care.

Co-design with a PCN ensures the hub meets the practical needs of social prescribing and care co-ordination teams from the outset. 

Critically it provides other PCNs with a fit for purpose solution that can be adopted and configured for your own services quickly and seamlessly. 

If your PCN is looking for a simpler, more connected way to manage social prescribing and care co-ordination with intuitive functionality designed for optimal day to day practice, this blog shares what we have developed and how it could work for your teams.

"We were looking for a solution that could do much more than simply manage referrals. Our ambition was to create a secure, collaborative platform that provides a digital front door to local services, supports multidisciplinary team working, and enables information to write into the clinical record to improve continuity of care.

 

As Integrated Neighbourhood Teams continue to develop, it was important that the solution could support not only our Social Prescribing service but our wider Personalised Care Team, while also facilitating joined-up working across primary care, community, local authority and voluntary sector partners."

 

Bradley Hough, Digital & Transformation Lead, 
North Arden and Nuneaton & Bedworth Primary Care Networks

Built on RIVIAM’s existing secure platform 

The hub builds on RIVIAM’s established referral management and care co-ordination digital services.

As Paul Targett, CEO and Co-Founder of RIVIAM, explains:

"We’re able to unlock the power that RIVIAM has from our core referral management service and apply it to social prescribing. 

It also forms part of a wider ambition to connect primary care, social prescribing teams and voluntary and community organisations through a more joined-up care co-ordination network."

"Working with RIVIAM has been a genuinely collaborative experience. Their established track record of connecting health, care and voluntary sector organisations gave us confidence that we could co-design a solution that meets our current needs, whilst supporting our long term vision.

 

The launch of the hub is an important step towards better co-ordinated care, improved visibility of patient outcomes, and a more connected system of support for our patient population."

 

Bradley Hough, Digital & Transformation Lead, 
North Arden and Nuneaton & Bedworth Primary Care Networks

Making work for your team easier 

Unlike other social prescribing systems that are cumbersome to navigate, RIVIAM provides a more intuitive, easy to use, secure solution that is modern, accessible and designed to deliver your teams productivity enhancements. 

It brings together: 

• Referral intake and triage
• Shared caseloads
• Patient records and case history
• Warnings and flags
• Diary and appointment management
• Consultation and outcome management
• Task management and automated messaging
• Integrated service directory
• Clinical system integration. 

The result is connected processes, clear visibility across the team and a consistent way to manage care from referral to outcome.

What sets RIVIAM apart 

RIVIAM delivers all the core functionality needed for social prescribing and multi-disciplinary care co-ordination, with additional features that make our hub more flexible and distinct from other digital providers.

Task management 

RIVIAM’s standout task management gives teams a clear view of what needs to happen next, when it needs to happen and who is responsible.

Tasks can be assigned to individual cases, helping team members stay on top of their actions, while giving team leaders oversight of progress across the service.

By replacing separate lists and manual workarounds with one co-ordinated view, RIVIAM helps teams manage workloads more effectively, keep care moving and improve overall service delivery.

Flexible diary management 

Caseworkers can manage their own appointments while maintaining visibility across the wider team. Appointment lengths can reflect the time actually used, giving services a clearer picture of workload and capacity. This is optimal for reporting. 

Your teams can subscribe to the hub calendar directly through Outlook, making day-to-day diary management more convenient. 

Video appointments also give patients greater flexibility in how they access support.

Service Directory, connecting people with the right support 

The hub includes an integrated Service Directory helping social prescribing teams find appropriate local services as part of the person's care journey.

And there is a public facing version that gives citizens and professionals easy access to information about available support.

Designed with accessibility at its heart, the directory provides clear, intuitive search and navigation, helping users find the most relevant services quickly.

People can bespoke their settings such as for text size, style and colours. 

"We are particularly excited about the opportunity to expand the platform across our wider Personalised Care Team and support the future development of integrated neighbourhood working. The offering also includes our new community-facing service directory, providing a digital front door to local health, care and wellbeing services, which is already receiving positive feedback from users."

 

Bradley Hough, Digital & Transformation Lead, 
North Arden and Nuneaton & Bedworth Primary Care Networks

Connecting with the digital systems your teams already use

RIVIAM integrates with TPP SystmOne™ and EMIS Web, with Access Rio coming soon, helping reduce duplicate data entry and keep patient records accurate and up to date.

RIVIAM can automatically update patient information and coded clinical data, such as blood pressure, height and weight, directly into the patient record.

RIVIAM's integration capabilities also make referrals quicker and simpler for GPs. When a referrer is logged into their clinical system using CIS2 authentication, RIVIAM can pre-populate the referral form with the patient’s demographics and the referrer’s details, reducing the amount of information they need to enter manually.

An automatic check against the NHS Personal Demographics Service also helps ensure patient information is accurate and complete before the referral reaches the Social Prescribing Hub.

Insights from our delivery, some different perspectives 

We also wanted to share some of our inside story developing the hub.

Making it easier to connect people with the right support

For primary care teams, one of the challenges of social prescribing can be knowing how to access the right community care and VCSE services.

Different services may have different referral routes, forms and information requirements, creating unnecessary complexity and delay.

As Integrated Neighbourhood Teams continue to develop, the ability to bring information and data sharing together in one place for multi-disciplinary teams becomes ever more important. 

Dr Shanil Mantri, RIVIAM’s Medical Director, Clinical Safety Officer and a former GP, explains:

“One of the real challenges I had when I was in practice was keeping track of all the different referral routes, namely what form to use, how I would go about making a referral, and what information I needed to use.”

RIVIAM’s approach is designed to simplify that experience. 

Dynamic forms help collect the information social prescribing teams need in a structured way, while the hub gives social prescribing and wellbeing teams a simpler environment in which to manage referrals, record activity and deliver care.

Designed around PCNs, not the other way around 

One of the principles behind the hub was simple - the digital service should work around the PCN, rather than forcing the PCN to work around the technology.

RIVIAM worked with Nuneaton & Bedworth PCN to understand how referrals arrive, how they are triaged, how work moves between teams, where responsibilities change, how outcomes are recorded and how patients are engaged.

“We solution design with the customer in mind,” explains Matheus Canal-Drought, RIVIAM’s Business Analyst. 

 

“We understand the pain points they have and we want to solve them. We don’t want to put a product out there that is not useful just to have another digital service on the market. We want to create something meaningful and as well designed and secure as RIVIAM’s existing capabilities.”

That co-design has created a Social Prescribing Hub developed with a PCN, for PCNs.

From requirements to working software

Because the bub is built on RIVIAM's established platform, the team was able to start with proven referral management and care co-ordination technology rather than developing from scratch.

As Gareth Butt, RIVIAM’s Director of Software Engineering, explains:

“Having a team that are already very familiar with how GPs work, and in particular how referrals get moved around securely between systems and managed, meant we didn’t start off walking. We were able to start off running.”

Early prototypes were reviewed with the PCN, allowing feedback to shape the solution before development progressed through testing, training and deployment.

That collaborative approach continued during UAT.

When users identified that a patient's telephone number needed to be more prominent, for example, RIVIAM's development team implemented the change for the following day.

“The key thing is clarity,” says Claire Hopkins, RIVIAM’s Delivery Director. 

 

“Both the customer and RIVIAM need to know what’s being delivered, when and what outcomes we’re working towards.”

The PCN brought together digital, clinical and operational colleagues from the beginning, while regular meetings, demonstrations and project updates helped both teams remain aligned and focused.

For Vanessa Ryan, RIVIAM’s Project Manager for this service, the speed of delivery stood out:

“The amount that has been developed in such a short space of time has been really impressive and is something I am very proud of. Key to this is the fact that the hub is built upon RIVIAM’s existing platform and services.”