Infix Support Ltd was born at the end of September 2019 to address issues around hospital management of surgical procedures. The Scottish health-tech start-up seeks to revolutionise management of patient waiting lists and improve the use of operating theatre capacity and support staff in the NHS. The founder, clinician Dr Matthew Freer, a consultant anaesthetist, believes technology can be used to streamline the process, improving outcomes for patients. 

The management of patient waiting lists and operating theatre capacity is one of the biggest headaches for NHS managers. As a consultant anaesthetist, Dr Matthew Freer saw first-hand how inefficient the largely manual system in his NHS hospital was and wanted to improve it, improving the efficiency of use of the operating theatres and support staff, while also reducing the wait times for patients. All wait times were exacerbated by Covid-19, and when scheduled operations restarted, the desire to improve efficiency was again top of the agenda. Infix approached a third party to develop a cloud-based solution to tackle waiting list backlogs. The highly sensitive and challenging nature of the project demanded a partner with strong experience in healthcare, who could deliver enterprise-class scalability and the security required around patient data. Mitra Innovation was a natural choice for the project.

With previous experience building healthcare products, and ISO 27001 accreditation, Mitra already understood and employed the rigorous standards of data and system security appropriate for healthcare applications. This meant Mitra was well placed to redesign the original software, improving the architecture to ensure appropriate security, availability, scalability, accessibility and maintainability, ensuring compliance with healthcare security standards and making the solution production ready. Not only have Mitra delivered the cloud-based patient database tool to tackle waiting list backlogs exacerbated by COVID-19, but they have also been tasked with designing a dynamic middleware integration platform, to provide essential connectivity with existing systems such as TrakCare. Mitra was required to comply with stringent security and quality measures in order to integrate and host patient medical data on the Infix system. Mitra also supported Infix with their ‘Go to Market’ plan, which has involved a full-scale trial of the application by an NHS Trust in one of their hospitals.