Delivered: virtual wards business case

Health Innovation North West Coast’s Digital team is celebrating the delivery of a virtual wards business case and evaluation for Cheshire and Merseyside ICB – a project that was two years in the making. This is the largest and most in-depth business case and evaluation that has been commissioned from us. 

In 2022, Cheshire and Merseyside ICB asked us to provide evidence and further understanding of whether virtual wards could be a sustainable model outside the funding provided by NHS England. Funding for virtual wards that had been allocated on the back of Covid was running out and the ICB needed to determine if virtual wards were offering value to the system, and therefore if they should continue.   

The virtual wards in Cheshire and Merseyside included in the report were: heart failure, frailty, acute respiratory infections, palliative care and paediatrics. 

Jenni West, Associate Director for Digital at Health Innovation North West Coast, said: “Our team demonstrated remarkable collaboration to tackle the complex challenge of evaluating an innovative model in a healthcare system that is often under time and resource constraints.  

“Our collective effort allowed us to produce a robust set of artifacts, including a published paper, which provides detailed insights into the virtual ward model, its value and even potential for broader implementation.” 

Of the ‘artifacts’ created for the ICB were custom data dashboards so they could continue to collect the right data, and build further evidence around virtual wards.  

For the Health Innovation North West Coast team, the process of creating the report really highlighted the importance of working with the right data sets, learning how to collect that data, ensuring the data was ‘clean’, and having the time they needed to collect and collate it. That data foundation is now laid. 

In 2024, Health Innovation North West Coast was listed on a research paper, "Telehealth-aided outpatient management of acute heart failure in a specialist virtual ward compared with standard care”, that was published in the BMJ Heart and European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Heart Failure journals in 2024.

Health Innovation North West Coast would like to thank NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) North West Coast for its support in the delivery of the report.

More information on Cheshire and Merseyside’s virtual wards 

Read a recent news item from NHS Cheshire and Merseyside, which details how a virtual ward works. The item also reports that in 2024/25 more than 10,600 admissions were made to the region’s virtual wards, which would otherwise have been inpatient stays.  

The utilisation rate of virtual ward beds has increased significantly over the last year to an average of 89 per cent, taking the region from being one of the lowest performing Integrated Care Boards (ICB) in the country, into the top 10.