COVID-19 National Notification & Digital Tracing Service
Supporting test results delivery for people in Scotland.
NHS Humber Health Partnership
Digitising the severe asthma pathway to accelerate access to biologic therapies
The ask
In 2025, NHS Humber Health Partnership set out to transform how patients with severe, uncontrolled asthma move from district general hospital referral to specialist assessment and treatment. The existing pathway required referral into a specialist Severe Asthma Centre for review by a Multi-Disciplinary Team, and involved substantial cross-organisational data sharing between trusts. Fragmented information flows, duplicate investigations and sequential face-to-face appointments created avoidable delays in patients accessing guideline-directed care, including high-cost biologic therapies.
Professor Mike Crooks, Clinical Lead for Humber and North Yorkshire Respiratory Network, and his team were actively seeking a digital solution to streamline referrals, support faster MDT decisions and connect the specialist hub to referring sites across the region, including York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Harrogate & District NHS Foundation Trust.
Storm ID was engaged to design, build and deploy a Software as a Medical Device solution that would underpin a new hub-and-spoke model for severe asthma care across the partnership.
What we did
The project built on Storm ID's prior work digitising a heart failure diagnostic pathway in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, where the approach was independently evaluated through the OPERA study by the University of Glasgow's Digital Health Validation Lab and shown to deliver a 72% reduction in time to treatment. That evidence base gave the Humber team confidence that pathway digitisation could deliver comparable gains in a respiratory setting, and gave Storm ID a proven platform to adapt rather than build from scratch.
What we did
Discovery and clinical pathway design
The engagement opened with detailed discovery across the specialist hub and referring trusts. We worked with Professor Crooks's team and clinical colleagues at York, Scarborough and Harrogate to map the existing severe asthma pathway end to end, identify the points where delay and duplication were introduced, and agree how a digital workflow could replace them. The design work established how referral, virtual vetting, data collection, MDT review and treatment decisions would flow across organisational boundaries while preserving clinical governance at every step.
Platform configuration and build
Storm Diagnose, our core digital diagnostics platform, was configured and extended to support the severe asthma pathway. A permissions-based system was built to allow referring hospitals to track the progress of their cases while giving the central MDT hub full oversight of the regional caseload. Automated data collection replaced manual referral forms, and virtual MDT functionality removed the need for sequential face-to-face appointments. The solution was developed under Storm ID's ISO 13485 quality management system for medical device software, with information security governed by our ISO 27001 framework and Cyber Essentials Plus certification.
Integration and deployment
The platform was deployed as Software-as-a-Service on Storm ID's controlled Microsoft Azure tenancy, providing the security, compliance and scalability profile required across multiple NHS trusts. We worked closely with IG leads at each referring site and at the specialist hub to complete data protection impact assessments, agree information sharing protocols and integrate into existing clinical workflows with minimum disruption. Initial research for the pathway was supported by funding from AstraZeneca.
Launch and ongoing support
The service went live in October 2025, connecting the referring trusts to the central specialist hub and giving the MDT the tools to manage referrals and make treatment decisions at pace. Storm ID continues to provide platform support, iterate the solution in response to clinical feedback, and support expansion to additional referring sites.
This solution provides our multi-disciplinary team with the tools we need to manage referrals more efficiently, make faster decisions, and ultimately improve outcomes for our patients across the region.
Results
The new severe asthma pathway, underpinned by Storm Diagnose, delivers:
- Faster treatment decisions by reducing the time between referral and access to biologic therapies
- Improved data sharing across multiple trusts, with secure real-time collaboration between referring sites and the central MDT
- Reduced patient burden through fewer unnecessary face-to-face appointments and duplicate investigations
- Enhanced clinical governance with full pathway visibility for referring clinicians and the MDT hub
- A scalable regional model that can extend to additional referring sites and, in future, to other respiratory conditions including COPD
The deployment establishes severe asthma as the second condition pathway running on Storm Diagnose, alongside the heart failure pathway previously delivered in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. Together, these deployments demonstrate the platform's applicability across chronic conditions where diagnosis involves referral, testing, specialist review and treatment initiation.
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