Experts at Hand Capacity & Access Orchestrator

Separate waiting lists, referral routes, service spreadsheets and provider records can make it hard to see where available specialist time is being used, where demand is accumulating and why one setting receives support before another. This creates duplicated triage, opaque prioritisation and heavy assurance work. Software cannot manufacture missing clinicians, but it can reduce coordination loss and expose capacity gaps sooner.

The product should not replace EHCP case-management or school-level SEND tracking. Daily users need a portfolio view of specialist capacity, demand, waiting time, setting coverage, allocation decisions and outcomes. The buyer needs evidence that programme resources are being deployed transparently and that gaps in access are visible early enough to act.

The evidence establishes a new funded and measurement-heavy operating model, but not that a new standalone platform is inevitable. The hypothesis is strongest where partnerships currently reconcile capacity and access evidence manually across systems; it weakens if existing LA/ICB platforms can provide the same cross-service view with modest configuration.

Interview 8–12 local-area SEND partnerships and map one live specialist pathway. Run a paid pilot across 30–60 settings and measure time spent reconciling capacity/referral data, unallocated sessions, visibility of waiting-time inequity and reporting effort. Continue only if the partnership will pay to maintain the shared operational layer after the pilot.

Defensibility would come from a maintained Experts at Hand operating model: multidisciplinary capacity taxonomy, navigation rules, cross-partner allocation, waiting-time/reach measures, funding-to-direct-delivery evidence and integrations that let existing EHCP and school systems remain systems of record.

Give SEND leaders a defensible answer to where specialist capacity exists, where unmet demand is accumulating, how allocation decisions are being made and whether access is becoming more timely and equitable.

Proxy based — medium confidence.

Direct equivalent pricing is not publicly established. Useful benchmarks range from Student Radar at £4.25 per pupil/year to external educational psychology work at roughly £800 for a standard case and £950 for priority work. Test a bounded programme price rather than per-child pricing: an indicative £15,000–£30,000 six-month pilot covering one discipline and 30–60 settings, then £35,000–£80,000/year only if recurring operational value is demonstrated.

Evidence basis: Student Radar — pricing (Linked pricing/rate page; no exact comparable price was extracted for this review) is the closest verified adjacent anchor used here. Its buyer, duration and scope are not assumed to be identical; implementation is separated where the opportunity requires integration, assurance or managed delivery.

Ask one accountable NHS, council, employer, school-system or care-service budget owner to fund a paid test of Experts at Hand Capacity & Access Orchestrator lasting six months, using an opening price of £15,000–£30,000 and covering two operational teams and 50 representative referrals, cases or employees. Paid scope: A cross-partnership capacity and access workspace that ingests specialist workforce availability and demand, supports a single navigation/allocation workflow, highlights geographic or cohort gaps and produces programme-assurance evidence without replacing child-level SEND systems. Charge by service, organisation, enrolled person or managed cohort and compare the fee with current referral, case-coordination, absence-management and specialist-support effort. Measure time to action, safe escalation, case completion, avoidable hand-offs, staff hours and sustained return/retention. Continue only if time to appropriate action improves by at least 20%, no safety escalation is missed and the budget owner elects to continue. Stop or reprice if clinical or safeguarding quality falls, coordination effort rises or the buyer will not fund the next cohort.

Raise the score if at least two local areas pay for pilots and replace recurring cross-system reconciliation. Lower it below 70 if incumbent local-government/SEND platforms add adequate capacity management or if buyers conclude the problem is almost entirely clinician supply.