NHS Scotland renews Induction Attend Anywhere contract

NHS Scotland and the Scottish Government have renewed their contracts with Induction Attend Anywhere video consultation software for a further year.

Induction Attend Anywhere’s suite of services, tools and resources have been made available across all 14 regional health boards, where it is branded as Near Me. The service delivers the option of a simple patient-centric video consultation. For patients this reduces the time, expense and stress of travelling to an appointment. For clinicians, the software enables them to optimise their time and the capacity of staff, reduce the number of no shows and save money.

The renewed contract now runs until 31 March 2023 and will include the newly launched clinical group consultations, which was introduced at the end of last year. This will enable one-to-one consultations to take place within a group setting of patients with similar clinical conditions.

Between January 2021 and January 2022, over 985,000 Near Me video consultations were conducted. NHS Scotland estimates that over the past two years, around 47 million miles of patient travel have been avoided thanks to Attend Anywhere.

The service was first introduced to NHS Scotland in 2016 thanks to Induction’s first major national contract. Its deployment provided the blueprint for NHS England’s rollout of the service, which happened just prior to the pandemic. Induction acquired Attend Anywhere in July 2021, in a move that combined Induction’s virtual care platform with the Attend Anywhere software.

The Scottish Government has also extended its contract with Induction, to provide another year of the Attend Anywhere service for non-health public services support.

James Balmain, chief executive of Induction, said: “With the support of NHS Scotland and the Scottish Government we have shown that our products can be relied upon to deliver digital transformation strategies both within and beyond healthcare settings.”

He continued: “These contract renewals are the first positive milestones in our renewal strategy and set out the pattern we expect to see across a very high proportion of our existing contracts in England.”