PUFFIN: Platform for UndiFferentiated respiratory symptoms - Fast-tracking INnovation in primary care

THE PROBLEM

Long-term respiratory conditions, including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), affect around one in five people in the UK and have a major impact on patients and the NHS.

People with respiratory symptoms usually first see their GP, but many experience long delays before receiving the correct diagnosis and starting appropriate treatment. Current diagnostic tests can be difficult to perform, require specialist training, and are not consistently available across the UK.

Many promising new diagnostic technologies are being developed, including digital, AI-enabled and device-based tests. However, most have not been evaluated in the primary care populations where they are intended to be used. As a result, there is currently insufficient evidence for many of these technologies to be adopted into the NHS.

WHY IS PUFFIN NEEDED?

Improving the diagnosis of respiratory disease is a national priority. The NHS 10-Year Health Plan highlights the need to deliver more care in the community, support earlier diagnosis, and make better use of innovative technologies. Achieving these ambitions requires robust evidence that new diagnostic technologies are accurate, acceptable, cost-effective and can be successfully integrated into routine care.

PUFFIN has been designed to answer this challenge by creating a national platform for evaluating respiratory diagnostic technologies in real-world primary care settings.

THE PUFFIN PLATFORM

The PUFFIN Programme will establish a scalable platform for evaluating respiratory diagnostic technologies in primary care and generate implementation-ready evidence to support NHS adoption. Rather than evaluating one technology at a time, PUFFIN provides a single research platform where multiple promising respiratory diagnostic technologies can be evaluated using the same robust study infrastructure. This platform approach makes research more efficient, reduces duplication, and allows new technologies to be added over time.

Through five connected research domains, we will:

1. Diagnostic Accuracy Evaluation and Platform Delivery
   Evaluate how accurately innovative respiratory diagnostic technologies identify respiratory disease while providing the infrastructure needed to assess multiple technologies using a consistent approach.
2. User Acceptability and Pathway Integration
   Understand how acceptable and easy these technologies are for patients and healthcare professionals to use, and explore how they can be integrated into routine NHS primary care pathways.
3. Economic Value and System Readiness
   Evaluate whether new technologies represent good value for the NHS and understand their wider impact on healthcare services.
4. Inclusion, Equity and Sustainability
   Ensure new diagnostic pathways are inclusive, reduce health inequalities, and support environmentally sustainable healthcare.
5. Knowledge Mobilisation and NHS Uptake
   Work with patients, healthcare professionals, NHS organisations, policymakers and industry partners to translate research findings into routine clinical practice.

Patient and public involvement is embedded throughout the programme, ensuring that people with lived experience help shape every stage of the research

Study Duration

September 2026 – September 2028

Interested in PUFFIN?

If you have any questions about the study, or are a commercial partner interested in evaluating a respiratory diagnostic technology through the PUFFIN platform, please contact us at: hrc@phc.ox.ac.uk Please include "PUFFIN" in the subject line of your email.

FUNDED BY

NIHR School for Primary Care Research (SPCR) -

Who we work with:

The programme is co-led by the University of Oxford, University of Manchester, University of Southampton and Keele University, with support from the HealthTech Research Centre Network, University of Edinburgh, Bournemouth University, and the Centre for Applied Respiratory Research Innovation and Impact (CARRii).