RioMed’s flagship software, Cellma is a fully integrated healthcare solution that is designed for healthcare professionals by healthcare professionals. Its modular arrangement and flexible approach allows for full scalability and interoperability, to be used by a single healthcare professional to an entire health network. Cellma is based on the principle ‘as you like it’, as all the screens are completely customisable to the needs of the service and can be updated or modified when necessary. 

Cellma has been used to successfully run Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) services across the UK, by helping to improve the overall quality, efficiency and safety of patient data. Its continual development through customer feedback, clinical guideline input and market research makes it the cutting edge product that it is today.  

During this article, we are going to explore, how the ‘Quality Care Service Standards for the healthcare of people who have IBD’ are incorporated into our software: the complete standard can be found here.

Standard A: High clinical care

‘High quality, safe and integrated clinical care for IBD patients based on multi-disciplinary team working and collaborating across NHS organisational structures and boundaries’.

Cellma can help by incorporating the implementation standards A1 to A12:

• Standardizing the patient care across the region, aids the initial diagnosis and treatment of IBD.
• Capturing all information collected by a multi-disciplinary team to ensure a robust audit trail.
• Preventing any delay in patients care and treatment through embedded integrated care pathways (ICP), including the recommendations 1.1.1-1.1.5 from CG118.  
• Automatically generating patient summaries and letters means that information for referrals can be sent within 24 hours of examining the patient, helping them to get the care they require quicker.
• Allocating patients to a particular medical gastroenterology team; where prompts for both patients and staff tasks can be set in accordance with a patient’s ICP.
• Regulating the process of prescribing drugs through role based access and user directed screens.
• Ability to give advice to inexperienced prescribers through links to BNF and the incorporation of clinical alerts, such as drug contradictions.
• Carrying out patient level costings for all drug therapies, including the use of immunosuppressives and biological therapies to help track these expenditures, for audit purposes.
• Being able to recall patient notes in any specified geographical location ensuring continuity of patients data, regardless of the hospital they are being treated in and between medical and surgical interactions.
• Carrying out ward and bed management for inpatients through our user friendly electronic, touch screen technologies that allow ward managers to monitor live bed status, staffing levels and ward capacity levels.
• Having the capability to organise outpatients through the use of virtual wards.
• Incorporating benchmarks into Cellma (recommendations 1.1.1-1.1.5 from CG 118), such as:
• Carrying out investigations within 72 hours of an ulcerative colitis relapse
• Processing histological results within 5 working days
• Having the ability to maintain an up-to-date and electronic IBD register, incorporating annual review reminders for those patients in remission or not currently being treated.

Standard B: Local delivery of care

‘Care for IBD patients that is delivered as locally as possible, but with rapid access to more specialised services when needed.’

Cellma can help by incorporating the implementation standard B1:

• Providing effective patient care in secondary, primary and community health settings.
• Integrating with Cellma’s other modules such as pharmacy and laboratory or with a 3rd party systems to enable test results to be automatically uploaded to patients details, which can be shared by all relevant healthcare professionals, for example the patient’s GP.

Standard C: Maintaining a patient-centred service

‘Care for IBD patients that is patient centred, responsive to individual needs and offers choice of clinical care and management where possible and appropriate.’

Cellma can help by incorporating the implementation standards C1 to C5:

• Increasing patient involvement in their care by using self-assessment tools.
• Recording all information given to patients such as educational leaflets, lifestyle management and treatment choices (including recommendations 1.1.14-1.1.18 from CG 118).
• Providing satisfaction questionnaires for patients to comment on the quality of care in the IBD service; this can be completed electronically to aid rapid entry.

Standard D: Patient education and support

‘Care for IBD patients that assists patients and their families in understanding inflammatory Bowel Disease and how it is managed, and that supports them in shared decision –making and achieving the best quality of life possible within the constraints of the illness.’

Cellma can help by incorporating the implementation standards D1 to D4:

• Providing contact details for healthcare professionals and local support groups.
• Texting or emailing patients to remind them of their follow up appointments, reducing DNAs.

Standard E: Information Technology and audit

 ‘An IBD service that uses IT effectively to support patient care and to optimise clinical management through data collection and audit.’

Cellma can help by incorporating the implementation standards E1 to E3:

• Moving towards a paperless environment by maintaining an electronic record for each patient, containing all clinical notes and demographic details:
• Full patient medical history (e.g. previous diagnoses, lifestyle choices, risk factors, investigations, medications etc).
• Automatic generation of reminders and alerts embedded within it, e.g. to flag allergies. 
• Facilitating the National IBD Audit, by using the 3 levels of reporting that are available in Cellma, including:
• Customisable Dashboards: these provide a dynamic snapshot of user defined variables that are delivered as standard or can be customised by the user.
• Ad-hoc reporting: allows users to generate specialised reports in real time.
• Pre-defined detailed reports: these are set by users in advance and are often used to meet statutory or research requirements.
• The mortuary service where all the necessary details can be provided to the national data collection.

Standard F: Evidence- based practice and research

‘A service that is knowledge-based and actively supports service improvement and clinical research’.

Cellma can help by incorporating the implementation standards F1 to F3:

• Acting as an aid memoire, prompting users to ask a series of sequential questions during the assessments; this is particularly useful for inexperienced healthcare professionals, such as junior doctors.
• Rapidly identifying patients that would be eligible for research studies through its comprehensive reporting module.
• Incorporating all national and local datasets within the software, so that all relevant data can be put forward to the national reviews.

In addition to the quality standards and clinical guidelines mentioned above, Cellma also implements the following technology appraisals and interventional procedure guidelines: 

• NICE technology appraisal (TA 163)
• NICE technology appraisal (TA 187)
• NICE interventional procedure guidance (IPG 288)
• NICE interventional procedure guidance (IPG126)
• NICE interventional procedure guidance (IPG 101)
• NICE technology appraisal (TA 140)
• NICE interventional procedure guidance (IPG 161) 

If you would like to find out more about the quality, safety and efficiency benefits that Cellma can provide to your service, please don not hesitate to get in touch, please contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , we would love to hear from you.