Buku Medicine is an App and web platform that delivers concise, rapidly accessible clinical content with no login barrier (with password fatigue an increasingly identified problem according to the BMA).

With these human factors addressed from the outset, it has reached more than 45,000 users through word of mouth alone. Its purpose is straightforward: educating and empowering clinicians to get referrals right the first time.

Guidelines are a critical element of the referral pathway between primary and secondary care. They help to inform referrals, allowing more rapid resolution or prevent those which do not need specialist guidance altogether.

They are often, however, either held on systems which require a login, or on unwieldy websites which are hard for referrers to remember or access (30% of North East users do not access their guideline hosting site for these reasons). Under increasing pressure, referrers understandably see these hurdles and choose advice and guidance (A&G), incurring a cost & time burden, and a missed opportunity for education and enhanced patient care.

Heavy clinical workloads, rising administrative tasks, and an ever-expanding use of investigations, increase this burden further.

Acknowledging the issues of access to guidelines, Buku developed their Guideline integration platform within Buku Medicine. They create a bespoke document based on a Trust’s existing guidelines (or build one from pre-existing framework if no guideline already exists) which is then loaded into the platform, getting it into clinicians fingertips with just one tap, in under 25 seconds.

Impact

Each A&G carries an average £195 tariff to the ICB. It also requires an average 8 minutes of time for each of; administrative staff, referrer and specialist.

In the 6 months following deployment for Northumbria Haematology, A&G reduced by 12%, in the context of national increases of 16%. An overall relative reduction of up to 28%.

East Midlands Cancer Alliance receive and respond to 250 A&G to haematology per week. If these could be reduced by even 15% this would lead to:

• 1960 fewer A&G annually
• £382,000 tariff costs avoided
• 4 hours consultant time per week released
• Faster cancer diagnoses
• 98% primary care satisfaction

This platform can easily be applied to many other specialties, including the 8 already in the Buku medicine.

Implementation

The implementation is incredibly simple since it requires no interfaces with other systems, takes no patient data and is not a medical device. It requires only 20 minutes of Trust consultant time to check each bespoke document. Buku have DCB0129, Cyberessentials, presence on the ORCHA App store, and society & trust endorsements.
Buku charge £1300 per guideline integrated, but from year 2 onwards charge only £250 per year. Over 3 years this averages £600 per guideline offering a huge ROI.

“The implementation of Buku’s Guideline Integration has been incredibly simple for our trust, and is already having an impact on A&G queries, with great feedback from primary care users” — Northumbria Healthcare NHSFT Innovation Team

“I love this app. By far the best medical app. The content is useful, concise, well explained.”

Find out more about Buku medicine