Bio-Related

South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust (STSFT) has rolled out a patient engagement platform to help save on administration hours. 

The patient engagement platform from Healthcare Communications delivers digital appointment letters to patients and allows them to use an app to reschedule or cancel appointments. The platform has tackled the problem of a lack of accountability for paper processes and well as the issue of sending paper letters for short notice appointments.

The trust joins 37 other NHS trusts who are using the platform – including Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation trust who went live with it in July this year.

STSFT estimates it has saved an average of 37 hours per month which frees up time to focus on patient care. It has also been able to offer short-notice cancelled appointments to patients on waiting lists and reduced the number of ‘did not attend’ appointments by four per cent.

Laura Bond, head of outpatients and clinical administration South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, said: “The Patient Engagement Portal has transformed our appointment management processes. Our admin staff no longer have the burden of manually sending letters or answering unnecessary inbound calls, giving them more time to focus on caring for our patients.

“Moving our patient appointment communications to a digital workflow means we are now able to deliver information to patients in a format that works best for them. There are many benefits to our organisation and administrative team; it has truly helped us transform our department and the quality of service we can provide.”

The Patient Portal means admin teams are able to easily configure patient letters and there is also a fail-safe process triggering a paper letter to patients if digital communications are not accessed within 24 hours.

Kenny Bloxham, managing director, Healthcare Communications, said of the trust’s experience: “With more than 700,000 letters sent digitally, trust staff are spending much less time on administrative processes, freeing up more time for patient care and ensuring that appointments can be reutilised.

“The cost-saving benefits and improvements to accountability have also been significant, and we are looking forward to extending the use of the technology to community services, radiology and other surgery departments. With the appetite for personalised patient communication growing, the switch to digital-first communication is an important step for any organisation wanting to open the digital front door and remove barriers for patients to receive their healthcare.”

The trust estimates it has made annual cost savings of £240,000 thanks to the technology.

The roll out went live across STSFT’s outpatient service in October 2019 and the trust now hopes to extend its use to community services, radiology and other surgery departments. From November 2021 it also plans to deploy the Patient Portal to support the clinical prioritisation and validation of its elective waiting lists.

Adblock test (Why?)

Source link

NHS Wales has selected Malinko to supply its e-scheduling software to all of Wales’ community healthcare professionals.

The move follows a successful pilot as part of the nation’s new Neighbourhood District Nursing Model – a four-year research project.

Healthcare professionals can use Malinko’s mobile app to access their visit lists, moving away from paper or spreadsheet-based systems. The technology allows for the intelligent scheduling of staff by matching clinical skills with individual patients’ needs.

Visits are schedules by Malinko based on clinical priorities and travel routes are optimised to minimise travel time as much as possible. A live visit status board and staff safeguarding board also ensures real-time tracking of nurses while attending their visits.

The system has been designed to complement Electronic Care Record systems and the software is aligned with an organisation’s own clinical rules so patient care is delivered optimally and caseloads are assigned safely.

Paul Labourne, nursing officer for the Welsh Government said: “By transforming into a data-driven and transparent service, neighbourhood district nursing teams can integrate seamlessly into the broader health and social care network, and senior managers have the insight required to safely meet the needs of our communities.”

Richard Desir, director of nursing at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, added: “The contemporaneous data captured via Malinko allows us to analyse care pathways and see how we can reduce the number of patient visits to achieve our goals, including earlier discharge. We can forecast patient demand and create clear care pathways for different patient scenarios.”

The country is following in the footsteps of Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust, who used funding from NHS England and NHS Improvement to implement Malinko’s clinical e-scheduling system last month.

Rob McGovern, co-founder at Malinko, said: “We’re incredibly proud to have been selected to support Wales with a clinical system that is enabling community teams to reduce clinical risk, improve workforce planning and safely schedule and manage patients’ care (demand) and its distributed clinical workforce (capacity).

“The empirical data the Malinko system captures, holds and reports on that we make freely available will give the NHS in Wales the opportunity to safely move more clinical services out of hospital and bring care closer to home.”

Adblock test (Why?)

Source link

The University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust has launched patient flow management software as part of its Think Big project aimed at tackling the backlog of outpatient appointments.

With a waiting list of some 110,000 patients the trust’s project has developed novel ideas for reducing it – including taking over a floor of a large department store in the Dolphin Shopping Mall in Poole to expand room for seeing patients. Technology is also playing a key role in the programme of innovations designed to manage the backlog.

Mark Mould, chief operating officer at the trust, said: “We are determined to do everything we can to help work through our waiting list as quickly as possible. By thinking ‘Big’, and differently, UHD [University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust] is looking at innovative ways to reduce the lengthy elective care waiting lists.

“This Think Big project is a novel and ambitious transformation plan to provide high volume, low complexity face-to-face outpatient appointments, using processes developed from the running of the mass vaccine centres.”

Helping with the operation is Intouch with Health – who will play a key role in the management of patients. InTouch with Health was already in operation at Poole Hospital, but since its merger with Bournemouth – which used a different patient administration systems (PAS) – the resulting trust needed to integrate both PAS so that it could simultaneously manage data from outpatients attending appointments at the department store and those who attend a hospital site for appointments.

Mould continued: “Integration of patient data and efficient and effective patient flow management is key to this idea working efficiently, and we are pleased to be partnering with Intouch with Health to help us make it happen.”

Intouch with Health’s patient Flow Manager dash board will enable staff to access a central, digital dashboard for an oversight of individual patients during appointments. In addition its Wait Time Manager, Patient Check-in and Patient Calling modules have also launched.

Patients will be able to check in for scheduled appointments from their own digital devices once they arrive, which will help to support social distancing and give them extra convenience.

Peter Beaumont, sales director at Intouch with Health, added: “Integration is key to the success of this initiative and staff across the whole trust need to access a single view of all outpatient appointments and associated patient information at any given time across the four sites.”

Adblock test (Why?)

Source link

As an IT executive responsible for technology infrastructure, one of the things that always kept me up at night was the chance that the business would scale so quickly that the existing infrastructure would not keep the pace of evolving technologies. 

My mind would race thinking that this could result in lost revenue opportunities, failure to competitively differentiate in the healthcare market and/or missed opportunities for mergers and acquisitions. If this imaginary dilemma came true, it would not be a good look for the information services team or the organization’s leadership responsible for strategic planning within IT.

It was frequently top of my mind that changing and developing business requirements could result in a need for significant infrastructure investments. The investments themselves are sometimes challenging, but even more demanding is the time that is required to forklift or refresh major infrastructure components.

In some cases, these initiatives can take more than two years. Asking the business to pause for 24 months while you upgrade the technology infrastructure is unacceptable.

There are a few things that I think are key to successful posturing of service delivery in this situation. The first is that it is important to have a strategy around technology infrastructure refresh work. Understanding technology life cycles and articulating capacity and performance limitations to the senior executive team is instrumental to establishing and executing a good game plan.

Maintaining a large technology infrastructure requires constant investment just to keep the environment current, not to mention preparing for business growth. In order to foster strategic decision-making, technology leadership must have a crisp understanding of what the business is thinking in terms of growth and scale and what that means to them in terms of timing and investment requirements.

We would all like to roll out infrastructure technology with excess capacity and capability, but in the real world this is often not possible.

Next, you must have a solid team of professionals dedicated to an organization’s infrastructure technology and business continuity planning. This starts with architects that really understand the need for standards and the interoperability/integration of certain platforms. These folks are critical to ensuring that the right design takes place at the right junctures.

From there, it’s necessary to have a team of infrastructure engineers that is responsible for implementing and configuring the technology so that investments can be maximized. Lastly, the infrastructure operations or support teams are instrumental to keep the technology running while looking for trends that suggest problems are on the horizon.

I also believe that an organization must have strong governance in place in order to build infrastructure technology for the future. This governance ensures that prioritization and review is taking place, not only for technology investments, but for project investments that will likely require additional infrastructure technology.

Lastly, I think that having a strong relationship and partnership with the dominant players in the infrastructure space is key. This will help you better understand what other customers are doing and learn how to think about things that your organization is likely to be thinking about in the next few years. 

Similar to maintaining a relationship with the infrastructure providers, I think it also makes sense to have a strong partnership with research and advisory groups that can help you with planning efforts.

At the end of the day, technology infrastructure executives are going to have to sing for their supper. Having a solid track record of good investments and reliable/resilient technology is a good starting point to identifying and achieving goals. 

However, these folks also need to know enough about the business and how to help translate business requirements to infrastructure needs. This includes articulating risks for delaying investments or not being forward-thinking enough when it comes to designing and implementing new infrastructure technology.

As dollars get tighter and you are competing against other critical priorities, one must be very intentional around these investments that often don’t have a tangible return on investment calculation.

John P. Donohue is Vice President of Information Services Enterprise Services at Penn Medicine.

Adblock test (Why?)

Source link

A team at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has developed an automated algorithm which can detect geographic atrophy (GA) using a common eye scan.

Using optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans the team trained an algorithm to recognise the early signs, precise localisation and progression of GA automatically. They then tested the algorithm against a different set of human-graded OCT scans from patients at Moorfields Eye Hospital to compare results.

The algorithm consists of separate models looking at different aspects of GA: One predicts disease progression; while the other can determine specific features of the disease. It was developed using 984 OCT scans taken from 200 patients.

Findings, which have been published in Lancet Digital Health, have revealed the in-house algorithm was able to match, and outperform, predictions made by specialist clinicians, all in a fraction of a second using OCT scans.

The team, which was lead by Dr Konstantinos Balaskas at Moorfield’s Reading Centre, hope the algorithm will be hugely beneficial to clinicians providing care for patients with GA, who need a reliable and fast way to assess the severity of the condition, how fast it progresses and how well it responds to emerging new treatments.

Affecting more than 5 million people across the globe, GA is a severe and irreversible form of age-related macular degeneration. It can be difficult to detect in the early stages and there is currently no effective treatment available. However, there are promising treatments in development and it is hoped the Moorfield’s algorithm will help further this.

The research was funded by Apellis Pharmaceuticals, with support from the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology.

Dr Balaskas said: “A particular challenge for the management of GA at-scale is the need to reliably, objectively and rapidly quantify and monitor growth of area of GA on the retina using OCT scans and assess its response to potential treatments.

“We are the first academic/reading centre to develop an AI tool to do this. Developing it in-house and doing so at a standard required for publication in one of the top medical journals is a major accomplishment for our team, Moorfields, UCL and the NIHR. We hope it is a major step towards an effective treatment pathway for GA, which affects millions of people worldwide and often leads to debilitating sight loss.”

This latest piece of research follows Moorfields developing an artificial intelligence system which can predict whether people with age-related macular degeneration will develop the more serious form of the condition in their ‘good eye’.

The system, which was developed in partnership with Google DeepMind, was trained on datasets of anonymised retinal scans from 2,795 patients with wet AMD, a more serious form of the disease that can lead to blindness.

Adblock test (Why?)

Source link

Industry leaders have welcomed the government’s health and social care reforms but said technology has a bigger part to play in supporting patients and staff.

The reforms aim to address the record high of 5.5million people waiting for elective surgery in England and bring health and social care closer together.

The Build Back Better plan highlights the need to harness the latest data and diagnostic techniques to tackle the backlog of elective surgeries. Under the plans the government is set to establish a £250m elective recovery technology fund that aims to provide access to “cutting edge technologies”.

Part of this will see a white paper on integration that addresses how to bring together the two systems published later this year.

Health tech leaders have welcomed the commitment to better integration but said a “clarity” was needed on how integration would be delivered.

Will Smart, global director external relations at Dedalus, said: “Build Back Better rightly identifies the more effective integration of health and social care as fundamental to transforming health and social care and the critical role of ICSs delivering this.

“Sharing and scaling innovation across the system is also rightly identified as a critical enabler, and data, along with digital tools and services, will be fundamental to delivery.

“There does need to be real clarity from NHSX about how this digital integration will be delivered.”

Tom Whicher, chief executive of DrDoctor, added: “By validating who still needs appointments, stratifying and prioritising those patients, empowering them to use simple and high value digital tools to access care when they really need to, and by seeing them virtually, we have evidence that that shows recovery time can be reduced by several years.

“It’s great to see a dedicated £250m pot for cutting edge technologies but the challenge will be encouraging the health service to move at pace and have the courage to work in new ways.”

Whicher suggested technology could help clinicians to identify patients with the most urgent clinical need, and to encourage patients to take charge of their own care through digital bookings and appointments.

Dr Meghan Leaver, Co-Founder of Pep Health, said: “It’s important to remember not everyone accesses care equally, therefore funding to progress digital transformation, alongside additional capacity is vital to ensuring much-discussed health inequalities highlighted by the pandemic are not widened further.”

‘Poor sibling to the NHS’

The BUILD Back Better plan also addresses the need for urgent social care reform with a commitment for a white paper for social care to make the service more accessible and provide people with greater choice.

The cost of care is also set to be capped at £86,000.

Dr Ben Maruthappu, CEO and founder of digital social care provider Cera, said it would take “much more” than funding to address the social care crisis.

“Sadly, social care continues to be treated as the poorer sibling to the NHS, and we need to see greater levels of parity between the two. Additional funding is a big step in the right direction and is very much welcome, however it will take much more than just money to address the most pressing issues facing social care in the UK,” he said.

“The social care sector is in an urgent need of modernisation. In the same way that the NHS has invested significantly in digitalisation and innovation, this needs to be mirrored in social care.

“We should be investing in new technologies, and removing the manual admin and ‘whiteboarding’ which providers rely on would free up carers to focus on what they do best, which is care.”

Adblock test (Why?)

Source link

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) has signed a non-exclusive strategic research agreement with Sensyne Health to drive research into childhood disease through ethical AI application.

The agreement will provide Sensyne Health with access to anonymised patient data from GOSH so that it can apply its AI technology to help develop new treatments for rare and complex childhood diseases.

The research will focus on three key areas:

• Paediatric drug discovery: helping discover new medicines.
• Clinical decision support tools to support children’s care: developing and validating the effectiveness of AI-enabled software tools.
• Clinical trial design: Using AI to analyse retrospective clinical data and generate synthetic control arms to support clinical trials.

As well as working towards improving paediatric outcomes and accelerating research, the two organisations are looking to create the first global ethical AI paediatric research community through their collaboration.

Matthew Shaw, chief executive of GOSH, said: “Children are at the heart of everything we do and this collaboration is no different. It will offer the potential to use digital innovation to find and develop diagnosis and treatments much faster, not just for GOSH patients but children across the country and internationally.”

The five year deal will see GOSH receive equity in Sensyne Health plc, research funding of £250,000 per year plus a share of revenues, which will be reinvested to facilitate further research. Sensyne Health will have access to longitudinal, de-identified, anonymised patient data for AI analysis, with a dataset covering approximately 320,000 patients.

It marks the first time that Sensyne has focused on paediatrics, who has previously signed agreements with Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, The Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust and The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust.

Lord Drayson, CEO of Sensyne Health, added: “GOSH has invested heavily in its digital infrastructure and curation of its data which means we can start work immediately: together we aim to use the power of ethical AI to make a real difference in finding new and better ways to treat rare and complex childhood diseases and in future to develop a world-wide research community using ethical AI to improve the lives of children world-wide.”

Adblock test (Why?)

Source link

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has published a list of innovative technologies for Covid-19 and other diseases.

The 24 technologies are considered to have an “immediate and future impact” on Covid-19 preparedness and response, according to a statement from the organisation (WHO).

They also have the potential to improve health outcomes and offer a solution to an unmet medical need.

The compendium of technologies includes tele-education for Covid-19 to connect experts to clinicians around the globe; a Covid vaccination e-voucher tool to better track vaccine enrolments; a portable respiratory monitoring system; and ventilators with an extended battery that can be used where electricity is not available or unstable.

Dr Mariângela Simão, WHO assistant director general for access to health products, said: “Innovative technologies are accelerating access to healthcare everywhere, but we must ensure that they are readily available in all health facilities, fairly priced and quality-assured.

“WHO will continue to work with governments, funders and manufacturers to promote sustainable supplies of these tools during and beyond the Covid emergency.”

Some of the selected products are already addressing priority health problems in low-resource settings, according to the WHO.

A “critical example” is a smartphone application that allows the user to record accurate blood pressure measurements, it said in a statement.

The software-based platform transforms existing smartphones into a medical device capable of measuring blood pressure accurately.

Hypertension has increased from 650 million to 1.28 billion in the last 30 years with many people unaware they have the condition – yet technology can play a part in diagnosing the condition sooner.

Some 15 of the technologies are already commercially available.

All technologies were assessed against WHO standards for performance, quality and safety, affordability and regulatory approval.

A full list of the technologies and the reasons they were chosen can be found here.

Adblock test (Why?)

Source link

Three NHS trusts have selected Wolters Kluwer Health’s clinical decision tool as the company expands its UK customer base.

UpToDate is an evidence-based knowledge system that helps clinicians make the right decisions at the point of care. It gives clinicians access to peer-reviewed treatment recommendations and the latest best-practice guidance for more than 12,000 clinical topics and 9,500 graded recommendations.

North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust, Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust and Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust have all opted to use the solution. They join seven NHS trusts which deployed UpToDate during the Covid-19 pandemic.

As well as opting to use UpToDate, Calderdale and Huddersfield have also selected to use Wolters Kluwer’s drug information tool Lexicomp – which provides drug information and clinical content for pharmacists and clinicians.

Wolters Kluwer’s other new UK customers are:

• Advanz Pharma (UpToDate)
• SWMI – South West Medicines Information (Lexicomp)
• Belfast Health and Social Care Trust Regional Medicines and Poisons Information Service (Lexicomp)

Denise Basow, president and CEO of clinical effectiveness at Wolters Kluwer, said: “Clinical teams are used to dealing with complex medical conditions on a daily basis, often in highly pressurised settings when it’s critical to make the right decision. Access to decision-support resources such as UpToDate and Lexicomp provides a reassurance that they have the most recent and accurate information to hand, helping them deliver the best care everywhere.”

“Embedding UpToDate into the clinical workflow, through the Electronic Patient Record, also helps improve the decision-making process and, at the same time, enhances patient safety, quality of care and clinical outcomes.”

“This, coupled with UpToDate’s accreditation by the Federation of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom (RCP), allows clinicians to use UpToDate as part of their personal professional development, embedded into the clinical workflow.”

Adblock test (Why?)

Source link

This is the third article in a series regarding process-based opportunities as the healthcare industry begins to emerge from the challenges of the pandemic. As noted in the introduction to this series, each of these articles will define an issue, consider the problem and its implications to healthcare, and then present potential solutions.

Clinician burnout has been one of the leading challenges faced in healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic – parallel with a nursing shortage and a projected shortage of physicians looming not too far in the future.

While the majority of burnout studies and research have centered on physicians, burnout has long been recognized as an issue for the entire care team. Nothing has exposed this reality more starkly than the pandemic, with millions of Americans daily watching images on the news of hospital and health system staff being worked to death before their eyes.

As we begin to get a handle on the pandemic, things will go back to some semblance of normal in hospitals, health systems and physician practices, and care teams will return to their regular processes. 

That means the seeds of burnout will still be there in those processes but may have much more fertile ground in which to grow after what we all have been through. It will be our job as healthcare leaders to turn this around.

The problem

First, let’s look at what burnout is and is not. Burnout is not depression or anxiety, though it can present some of the same symptoms. It is not something that quickly takes over your mind, but rather a gradual process that escalates over time, and one of its core causes is chronic stress. In 2019 the World Health Organization classified burnout as an “occupational phenomenon,” and defined it this way:

“Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job.”

Implications for healthcare

In addition to the effects of burnout on the individual, there are major implications for healthcare overall. The National Academy of Medicine calls burnout among clinicians a serious threat to organizational health. One of the most recent and widely cited studies on provider burnout estimates the costs of physician burnout to the U.S. healthcare industry at $4.6 billion per year, mostly due to turnover and reduced clinical hours. That’s an annual cost of $7,600 per employed physician per year.

Nurses on the care team are also affected. A survey of 1,688 direct-care nurses in three hospitals conducted a year apart (2018 and 2019, with 3,135 total surveys) found that 54% of the nurses suffered from moderate burnout, and 28% experiencing high levels of burnout. 

The surveys also found that emotional exhaustion scores increased 10% and cynicism scores increased 19% after 1 year. For each unit increase in the emotional exhaustion scale, the study showed that there was a 12% increase in turnover. These surveys were completed just before the pandemic. Imagine what has happened in the past two years.

The Medscape 2021 Physician Burnout & Suicide Report, released in January, shows that the pandemic has worsened burnout, according to the more than 12,000 physicians who participated in the study. In this year’s study, 42% of physicians reported they were burned out, with 21% of them reporting that their burnout symptoms began after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The top six contributors to burnout cited by participants in the survey are familiar to those who study burnout in healthcare:

• Too many bureaucratic tasks
• Spending too many hours at work
• Lack of respect from administrators/employers, colleagues, or staff
• Insufficient compensation/reimbursement
• Lack of control/autonomy
• Increasing computerization of practice

Solutions to burnout in the workplace

The big takeaway from the earlier definition is that burnout is stress that has “not been successfully managed.” Just as there are ways that providers can manage their own chronic workplace stress individually, there are also solutions that organizations can put in place on a process level on the front end to reduce or eliminate those top contributors to burnout in the workplace and the impacts they have.

The common denominator that causes clinician burnout is too many tasks to do in a limited amount of time. The more we can do to automate and equip the clinician to be resilient, the better. In order to resolve the organizational and bottom-line effects of burnout in healthcare, emphasis needs to be placed on four areas:

1. Training. We often train clinicians once in a given technology, such as the EHR, and then we let them go forever. If you don’t refresh their knowledge as functionalities change and new upgrades happen, they are going to become overwhelmed.

2. Governance. Understanding when to roll out new processes and procedures and the impact it has on the rotation and the intake of patients and on productivity is what good governance is all about. Leaders need to comprehend the impact of their decisions so that they can efficiently and effectively manage the flow, so the stakeholders are not being inundated.

3. Communication. Engage the stakeholders early and communicate with them non-stop, ensuring they are always aware of what’s going on, using different channels and methods to communicate.

4. System building. The term system building may sound technical, but it is not about technology as much as it is about processes. Your goal is to build agile, effective processes that don’t require the clinician to do the same things multiple times. Anything we can do to decrease the number of clicks, the number of screens they open, or the number of places they have to go to for information will go a long way toward reducing their level of burnout.

Focusing on these areas can undo some of the human and financial damage done in healthcare organizations from years of inefficient operations, outdated technologies and lack of integration in care teams. 

This will give care team members more time to concentrate their attention on something they care deeply about and that benefits the entire organization—providing high-quality patient care.

Sam Hanna is an executive-in-residence at American University. Prior roles include being a consulting practice leader, a chief strategy and innovations officer, and a digital strategist at global consulting firms such as PwC and Deloitte. He holds a PhD in Translational Health Sciences from The George Washington University and a MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson College.

Adblock test (Why?)

Source link