InHealth provides diagnostics and imaging services to the NHS, private hospitals and clinics, including MRI, CT, X-Ray, DXA, nuclear medicine, mammography, ultrasound, interventional cardiology, audiology, ENT, endoscopy and physiological measurement. It operates in both acute care and primary care. The company is also involved with pain management services and physiotherapy.
The company reports that it provides services to more than 2 million patients per year (both NHS and private).
Strategy
The company employs around 1,900 people, including clinical specialists and patient referral teams. Its services are provided from over 350 locations in the UK and Ireland and it works with a significant majority of NHS Trusts in the UK covering over 200 hospitals and over 100 community health clinics.
InHealth divides its business as ‘Community’ and ‘Hospital’. In the community sector, the company has contracts with a large number of CCGs (clinical commissioning groups) for direct access diagnostics following GP referral. The company is also part of AQP (any qualified provider) contracts.
In the area of hospital trusts, InHealth has both mobile and fixed sites available. InHealth has a mobile fleet of over 55 fully mobile diagnostic scanners and a number of semi-permanent facilities.
In April 2017, InHealth reported the appointment of Geoff Searle to manage Integrated Services for the company signalling the company’s strategy to improve its delivery of integrated services, i.e., building more multi-service locations.
InHealth’s business strategy has included acquiring existing diagnostic companies such as Preventicum and Vista Diagnostics. Recent company acquisitions are Radiographer Reporting in January 2016, Pain Management Solutions in June 2016, and in September 2016, 76% of Health Intelligence.
Financials
The most recent accounts for InHealth Ltd are for the financial year ending September 2017, according to Companies House. The company reported revenue of £108.6 million, up from £102.6 million in 2016. The company made a profit of almost £2 million. InHealth is part of InHealth UK Holdings Ltd.
The ultimate owner of InHealth is The Damask Trust, the trustees of which are Ivan Bradbury, the owner and CEO of the company, and the Embleton Trust Corporation Ltd.
Contracts
InHealth has a great many individual contracts with clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) and hospital groups and is also listed on several framework contracts. A framework contract involves a list of providers that have been approved to carry out the services covered by the contract. The amount of work each provider carries out is not fixed. This section focuses on the company’s most recent awards and lists only a fraction of the company’s total contracts.
In March 2019, InHealth was awarded a contract for PET-CT scanning in the Thames Valley area, including Oxford. This contract is part of the process under which all the PET-CT scanning in England has been put out to tender. The process has taken place in two phases – I and II. InHealth has won part of the phase II tender – lot 4 – which covers Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. The contract is for seven years. InHealth will replace the service provided at the Churchill Hospital, Oxford.
In the same month, InHealth was awarded a place on a framework contract for remote teleradiology – the remote assessment of diagnostic images – and a contract to provide diagnostics services to prisons in the north of England. The latter contract is worth over £4 million.
In February 2019, InHealth was awarded a place on an AQP (any qualified provider) contract for adult audiology services in Hammersmith & Fulham, Central London, and West London.
In January 2019, InHealth was awarded a place on a framework contract to provide remote teleradiology services to hospital trusts over much of the north of England. The latter framework is valued at £100 million with nine suppliers listed on the framework contract. In the same month, the company was listed on an AQP contract for a community physiotherapy service as part of musculoskeletal services in North East Lincolnshire.
Contracts awarded in 2018, include a contract from North Kirklees CCG to provide community pain management services, a contract for Audiology services from Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire CCG, a community gastroenterology service in Ipswich and North Suffolk, a diagnostics service in Ealing, and radiology services for Brent CCG.
Other recent contracts include new diagnostic service contracts across the country, including radiology contracts in Croydon, Kingston and Walsall, major breast screening contracts in Outer North-East London and Surrey and adult ENT and audiology services in Southampton.
In January 2017 InHealth took over Care UK’s Manchester CATS service.
In early 2016 InHealth was awarded a place on a framework for temporary and long term provision of mobile therapy units. Under this framework InHealth could provide mobile diagnostics.
Concerns
Questions have been raised over the extent to which preventive diagnostics, such as those carried out by InHealth’s subsidiary Preventicum, actually benefit patients with some arguing that in many cases they are unnecessary. Consumer group Which? has argued that some tests “are likely to cause more harm than good, some give widely inconsistent results and little useful information, and some detect disease when it’s not really there.” They add that “false results cause worry, more investigations, and even unnecessary treatment – at a cost to the individual or the National Health Service”.
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