Help Others Discover – Click to Share!
THE 2-HOUR CLOCK: The national standard expects clinically appropriate referrals to receive assessment and intervention within 2 hours, with at least 70% of eligible referrals meeting that standard.
120 minutes. 70%. 83.5%. 85.4%. 35,000 patients/month. 100%. 27.3 fewer admissions/week. 179.2 fewer acute bed-days/week. 63.5%.
The NHS Urgent Community Response is striving to provide urgent healthcare in the community to approximately 100,000 patients a month, with the target to reach 70% of patients in crisis in under 2 hours.
These numbers tell an increasingly important story: urgent community services are handling more demand while working against strict response expectations. With referrals coming from NHS 111, GPs, ambulance services, community teams, hospitals, virtual wards, care homes and social care, disconnected records and manual processes can make timely coordination harder.
The NHS 10-Year Plan is pushing care in the same direction, from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and fragmented services to connected care. For community-based urgent care response, this means digital systems need to connect clinicians, services and patients around one shared flow of information. A connected patient record, patient portal and NHS App integration can give patients more digital access while helping community teams work with timely information across the wider care journey.
Urgent care response is designed to help people receive the right care closer to home, prevent avoidable hospital admissions, reduce pressure on A&E, minimise unnecessary ambulance conveyances and support independence. The national standard expects at least 70% of clinically appropriate referrals to receive assessment and intervention within 2 hours.
But responding quickly is only one part of the challenge.
A typical community episode can involve multiple health and social care professionals, such as an ambulance clinician, nurse, GP, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, pharmacist, social care professional or mental health practitioner. Each professional may need access to different pieces of the patient’s story, including medications, allergies, diagnoses, observations, care plans, previous admissions, assessments and outcomes.
When that information is spread across systems, teams can face:
The result? The clinical team may spend valuable time finding information instead of acting on it.
Cellma brings together patient information, clinical workflows, referrals, interoperability and reporting within a connected digital environment.
For Urgent Care Response, that means creating a clearer,time efficient journey from referral to outcome.
Urgent community care does not begin in one place. Referrals can arrive through NHS 111, GPs, ambulance services, community nurses, care homes, hospitals, virtual wards, social care teams and emergency departments.
Cellma can bring these pathways into a structured patient record, capturing key referral information such as:
✓ Referral source
✓ Reason for referral
✓ Patient details
✓ Priority
✓ Location
✓ Required response
✓ Clinical information
Instead of chasing information across multiple channels, teams can work from a shared digital starting point.
In urgent care response, every minute matters.
Cellma can support time-based workflows that track the journey from referral through triage, clinician allocation, patient contact, assessment, intervention and outcome.
That creates a clearer operational picture:
Referral → Triage → Allocation → Visit → Assessment → Intervention → Outcome → Discharge/Onward Referral
With real-time dashboards, operational teams can see referrals waiting, response times, cases approaching the threshold and overall performance.
The importance of this is growing as NHS reporting has expanded. From April 2026, reporting includes all UCR referrals and introduces a referral-rate metric per 100,000 population, giving organisations a broader view of demand and capacity.
Community care is inherently multidisciplinary.
Imagine an older patient experiencing a fall. A nurse records observations and clinical findings. A physiotherapist assesses mobility. An occupational therapist evaluates the home environment. A pharmacist reviews medication. Social care considers ongoing support.
With a connected EHR, these contributions can sit within the same patient episode rather than separate records.
Cellma’s single patient record approach supports this connected model, helping authorised professionals access relevant information and contribute to the patient’s care journey.
That can mean less repetition, fewer information gaps and better coordination between teams.
A modern community EHR cannot operate in isolation.
Cellma supports interoperability through HL7, FHIR, RESTful interfaces and Open APIs, helping connect clinical and operational systems. Its NHS integration capabilities include CIS2, PDS, GP Connect, Summary Care Record, NHS e-RS and EPS, supporting information exchange across different points of care.
This matters because NHS community services continue to face interoperability challenges, including variable digital maturity, EPRs that are not always suited to community services, manual data collection, duplicated data flows and difficulty linking patient-level information across pathways.
For urgent care response, interoperability can connect the dots between:
Ambulance → UCR → GP/Primary Care → Community Services → Virtual Ward → Hospital → Social Care
The goal is simple: information should move with the patient, not get stuck in a system.
Connected care should not stop with clinicians.
A patient portal can give people access to relevant appointments, communications, questionnaires and information without requiring every interaction to happen by phone or through paper-based processes. Cellma’s patient-facing capabilities can support this digital journey, while integration with the NHS App can help fit patient interactions into the wider NHS digital ecosystem.
For community services, this creates an important link:
Connected Clinical Record + Connected Professionals + Connected Patient
Patients can remain more involved in their care while clinicians have better visibility of the information surrounding the episode.
One of the biggest opportunities for urgent care response is its ability to change what happens after an urgent call.
The Ashford example demonstrates the potential of coordinated community pathways.
Metric | Result |
Increase in hear-and-treat | +6.2% |
Increase in see-and-treat | +7.6% |
Reduction in see-and-convey | -14% |
Fewer acute admissions per week | 27.3 |
Fewer acute bed-days per week | 179.2 |
Ambulance referrals via SPA MDT (monthly) | ~170 → 278 |
These figures are an example from a specific NHS England case study, not national averages.
The digital lesson is significant.
When community teams can identify suitable patients, access the right information and coordinate care effectively, more people can potentially receive care without an unnecessary hospital journey.
Cellma’s reporting and analytics capabilities can take the conversation beyond individual episodes.
Healthcare leaders can use structured information to understand:
This supports the shift from asking “Did we respond within 2 hours?” to asking “What is driving demand, where is capacity needed and what happened to the patient?”
And because community clinicians work away from desks, mobile access is equally important. Mobile EHR functionality can support documentation, observations, clinical templates, electronic referrals, voice-to-text and real-time updates at the point of care.
The future of urgent care response is not simply about responding faster. It is about connecting the entire pathway around the patient.
Cellma brings together:
✓ CONNECT — referral sources, services and systems
✓ RESPOND — urgent workflows and time-critical activity
✓ RECORD — structured clinical information at the point of care
✓ COORDINATE — multidisciplinary teams around one patient record
✓ REPORT — activity, performance and patient outcomes
This is where Cellma becomes more than an EHR. It can act as a digital foundation for connected community pathways, linking acute, primary, community and patient-facing care while supporting the NHS direction towards integrated, digitally enabled services.
Urgent care response is becoming an increasingly important part of delivering care closer to home. As demand grows and community pathways become more connected, healthcare organisations need digital infrastructure that can keep pace.
Cellma brings together the patient record, referrals, clinical workflows, interoperability, mobile working, patient engagement and analytics needed to support this model.
Because when information moves faster, teams can coordinate better. And when teams coordinate better, patients have a greater opportunity to receive the right care, in the right place, at the right time.
Ready to See How Cellma Can Support Connected Urgent and Community Care?
Recent Blogs
Let’s transform healthcare together. Speak with RioMed for a tailored solution.
Cellma connects referrals, patient records, clinical workflows, MDTs, reporting and interoperability in one digital environment, helping community teams coordinate care from referral through to outcome.
Yes. Cellma can support time-based workflows and dashboards to monitor referrals, triage, clinician allocation, visits, interventions and response times, helping teams identify cases approaching or exceeding the 2-hour threshold.
Cellma supports interoperability through HL7, FHIR, RESTful interfaces and Open APIs, alongside NHS integrations such as GP Connect, PDS, Summary Care Record, NHS e-RS and EPS, helping information move across primary, community and acute care pathways.
