The innovative Health Tech Awards celebrate and showcase exceptional projects, teams, technology and organisations across health and care that are making a real difference.
In this article we cover the winners of the awards and highlight their projects and link to resources for further information.
At HTN we are really proud of our innovative awards ceremony, and we have some great (we hope) ideas to make the 2020 awards even better. We want to hear your thoughts, please take our 3 minute survey here to let us know what you think.
Vijay Magon, CEO of CCube Solutions the awards sponsor said “I would like to congratulate everyone who participated in the Health Tech Awards 2019. The competition was extremely high and it’s testament to show there’s lots of great work happening in healthcare through technology. You could see from the awards evening there’s thousands of passionate people who are really behind transforming health and care. It’s absolutely a time to share what we do and learn from best practice examples, there’s lots of proven technology that benefits one organisation that a next would really benefit from. The awards are a great place to see that and hear about the work from lots of providers across the country.”
Susan Venables, Founder and Director of Highland Marketing “We leapt at the opportunity to sponsor these awards because they were set up to do something that Highland Marketing has always sought to do: and that is to tell stories about the good things that are happening in health tech. We want to celebrate the good work that is being done and to shout about success, so it is easier for suppliers and NHS organisations to get support for and engagement with the IT projects that can make a real difference to the service, clinicians and patients.”
Overal Winner – Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust
The Trust has been on a transformation digital journey since 2017 with the implementation of Cerner and more recently has connected systems with Bradford Teaching Hospitals. The organisation also utilises NerveCentre Software for is e-obsevrations, bloods, and sepsis alerts. The Trust digitised 250,000 records a few years ago and is positively sharing and viewing information in real-time through the MIG with GPs.
Excellence in Mobile Healthcare – Babylon Health
Shivon Byamukama – Managing Director, Babyl “It’s wonderful to see HTN recognising the importance of mobile healthcare not only in the UK, but across the world. Babyl is changing the lives of millions of people in Rwanda who can now access healthcare without walking for miles or queuing at the hospitals waiting hours for a consultation. The lessons from our work in Rwanda will help us move into other areas of Africa and improve even more lives.”
To date, babyl has had over 520,000 completed appointments, conducting between 2500 and 3000 consultations every single day. Over 95% of users consistently report they are satisfied or very satisfied with the service.
More information about Babyl please see: http://www.babyl.rw/
Tech Project of the Year – GE, The Bradford Command Centre Transformation Programme
Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in partnership with GE Healthcare Partners, delivered a Command Centre Transformation Programme, a technology-enabled programme of work that is a first-of-kind in Europe.
Jeff Terry, CEO Clinical Command Centres, GE Healthcare Partners “We are honoured to partner with our friends in Bradford to deliver real change for their patients and care teams. First-of-kind innovation like this takes courage and foresight, and we applaud Bradford for their leadership in putting digital tools to work for even better and more efficient patient care.”
For more information on the GE Healthcare Partners Command Centre please click here.
Best Administration Time Savings – Healthcare Communications and Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Patient Letters
Healthcare Communications has created secure digital letters that are instantly delivered to a smartphone enabling patients to confirm/cancel/rebook with 1 tap.
Digital content converts to 99 languages and if the letter isn’t accessed within 24 hours, a postal letter is automatically sent.
Notably Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust reduced postal costs: 48% postal cost savings and the DNA rate significantly.
Barnsley was the first hospital Trust to offer patients digital appointment letters Trust wide. Their success has led to a further 16 UK Trusts going digital first with letters, saving the NHS over £2 million in postal costs.
Excellence in Engagement and Communications – North of England CSU, Savings for over the counter prescribing
Ben Murphy, Marketing Manager, NECS “We are delighted to have won a Health Tech Award 2019 for Excellence in Engagement and Communications for our medicines campaign regarding over the counter prescribing. We are now working with stakeholders to coproduce the next phase of the campaign with refreshed artwork and messages and are looking forward to launching these soon. All of our current materials are available at https://mymedicinesmyhealth.org.uk and you can follow the campaign on Facebook and Twitter @NHSmymedicines.”
Health Tech Team of the Year – North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust
North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust a small digital programme team is punching well above its weight in helping to create one of the most digitally advanced Trusts in the NHS.
The team’s focus is first and foremost on providing the digital tools healthcare professionals need to deliver the best care possible for the 400,000 patients treated at the Trust each year.
The Trust is on track to achieve HIMSS level 6 in the next 18 months, and level 7 in the next two years, whilst its Clinical Digital Maturity Index is rated at 95%.
Partnership of the Year – Infinity Health: Saving over 10,000 hours a year with London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust
Infinity is a secure collaboration and task management solution. The Infinity ePortering solution was implemented in the Emergency Department at Northwick Park Hospital and is now used to coordinate over 100,000 transfer requests per year, saving over 10,000 hours of staff and patients’ time each year.
The Infinity ePortering solution was implemented in the Emergency Department at Northwick Park Hospital on October 29th 2018 and is now used to coordinate over 100,000 transfer requests per year. With Infinity, staff can request a collection or patient transfer using secure mobile devices and porters can accept and share their activity in real-time.
The average time to complete a request has been reduced by 6 minutes, which translates to a saving of over 10,000 hours of staff and patients’ time each year.
Saving 10,000 hours: improving patient flow in the Emergency Department through portering
User-led Innovation and Experience – Accenture, NHS Digital and Healthy London Partnership, Social Care Digital Discovery: Empowering a Digital Social Care Workforce
A project between Healthy London Partnership, NHS Digital and Accenture that truly collaborated with the social care sector. Through focusing on what really mattered to the care providers they spent time with, the team created a range of support and marketing materials that both enable and empower social care professionals to start connecting digitally with their health sector colleagues, starting with NHSmail.
The range of materials created with the care providers can be found here.
Most Promising Pilot – Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS FT Digital Day Case Knee Pathway
CHFT are leading a transformation project for knee replacements with a digital pathway that optimises patient’s self-management and control of the procedure. Where patients are able have their knee replacement and go home the same day with enhanced recovery using sensors and home monitoring.
Best use of EPMA – North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and InterSystems
North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust recently completed the roll out of a new electronic prescribing and medications administration (ePMA) module to all inpatient and emergency wards, marking an important stage in the Global Digital Exemplar ‘fast follower’ Trust’s ambitious digital journey.
The deployment is one of the biggest transformational changes the Trust will implement as part of its electronic patient record programme, and is already having a big impact at the ward level and for the 400,000 patients cared for each year.
Consultant Physician, Dr Jay Vasani, said of the Programme: “Medications are visible whenever and wherever we need them. You can access vital prescribing information in seconds, which is essential in a crisis. TrakCare ePMA has made prescribing much simpler and more effective. Clinicians can now access a complete prescribing record from the portable terminals, making it quicker to monitor and prescribe medications.”
Digital at the Point of Care – Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Nursing eDocumentation
Between April and July of 2018 Leeds Teaching Hospitals engaged in it most significant step in its digital at point of care journey and development of its in-house built Electronic Health Record (EHR), culminating in the removal of circa 2 million pieces of paper nursing documentation from the Trust.
The innovative eForms framework gathers, stores, shares and analyses data from across the trust and enables unlimited expansion of the EHR. The solution allows clinicians and subject matter experts to design their own eForms and share them with colleagues. This accelerates collaboration and agreement on new features, without reliance on external software provider release cycles. This in turns enables a focus on functionality and testing allowing rapid roll-out to be married to high quality and low defect delivery. Once published into live, the eForms vital data is available immediately at the point of care on any device.
Best Connecting Healthcare Project of the Year – Northern Ireland and Orion Health, Diabetes Care Pathway
The Diabetes Care Pathway (DCP) is an integrated care system that is transforming care provision for diabetes patients across NI. Ensuring faster diagnoses, better decision-making and improved care coordination.
Gary Birks, General Manager – UK & Ireland, Orion Health “We are delighted that the Diabetes Care Pathway is being used by the multi-disciplinary group of medical professionals involved in caring for patients living with diabetes. The Pathway builds upon the rich clinical data available within the Northern Ireland Electronic Care Record, such as real-time laboratory results, and allows clinicians to access this information easily in one place leading to more effective and efficient patient care. This includes professionals who have often sat on the periphery of information sharing, such as podiatrists.” .
Impact of the Year – Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Digital Health, Workforce of the Future
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Technology Services Team have been working with the Inspira Group and Lancashire Enterprise Advisor Network to inspire the workforce of the future. A large group of the team attend high schools in the area and take part in various active workshops with all the young people to give an insight into working in Health Technology in various fields.
Saeed Umar, Head of Technical Services has developed a career pathway which is currently being finalised where the trust can create the correct learning environment for potential recruits and fill the gaps in recruitment that the industry faces over the coming years in the digital workspace.
The Technology Services teams at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has developed relationships with leading colleges in Lancashire to help embed the Technology based industry relevant learning within the College & School curriculum, this year will be expanding the student intake with additional students from two colleges.
Recently the Technology Team ran a Digital workshop activity for Penwortham Girls School which was highly successful to provide a snapshot in the future of technology in a Hospital environment.
In June 2019 Saeed as an Enterprise Ambassador as part of the Inspira network (https://www.inspira.org.uk/) presented to students at Moor Park High School and 6th Form college.
Best Use of Data – Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust, iBox Operational Data Visualisation Tool
ibox was developed to help the Trust to deal with the challenges associated with patient flow. In order to reduce A&E breaches we needed to improve bed management, and patient discharges. ibox provides visibility of information from a number of clinical systems to provide a highly visible patient record.
Lee Taylor, Deputy COO for Northampton General Hospital stated “ibox has enabled trust wide visibility of Emergency Department activity and acuity enabling a much more responsive, nimble and dynamic trust wide approach to prevent unsafe crowding in the Emergency Department as we can easily see when tension and pressure is developing and mobilise staff to assist.”
The Trust are continuing to expand the ibox functionality to provide tools to support proactive management of patient flow through the Emergency Department and throughout their stay as an inpatient.
Primary Care Innovation – Eastern Academic Health Science Network, Lea Valley – Digital Support Officer
Lea Valley Health is a federation of 8 independent GP practices with the mission to develop a modern, efficient and responsive services, fit for purpose in the 21st century to meet the growing demand of its local population. To deliver on this mission they wanted to shift unnecessary calls and face to face appointments to online services, to not only improve the quality of care through enhancing patient experience and convenience, but also help realise efficiency benefits such as reduced administrative burden and fewer missed appointments.
Richard Moore CEO Lea Valley Health commented: “Core to the success of this initiative was enabling greater digital literacy and engagement with the appointment of a Digital Engagement Officer funded by Eastern AHSN. It was also key to get the content right, the platform needed to be both a resource of valuable information on health and social care whilst also make it easy for patients to use online services in the place of face to face or telephone calls as appropriate.”
The results impressed the judges: online engagement quadrupled in just one year and the shift to online patient requests resulted in efficiency and productivity gains for the practices and more convenient services for patients. Notably over half of those who switched to using online services (55%) reported that they would have previously called the clinic, and one in ten (10%) would have made unnecessary face to face appointments. This is estimated to have resulted in the reduction of 3,781 phone calls and 652 unnecessary appointments.
Eastern AHSN have produced an implementation guide to share lessons learned from the project and assist other primary care providers in making a more effective move to digital services.
#HealthTechtoShoutAbout (Sponsored by Highland Marketing) – University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, My Medical Record
My Medical Record is an online service that connects patients into the hospital and their care team whilst they are away from the hospital. The service supports new models of care in enabling clinical teams to manage and support patients remotely leading to a number of efficiencies and savings.
It has supported self-management and cuts un-necessary outpatient attendances out of the system. The key with this model of care predicated on My Medical Record is that patients are able to actively engage in their care. They see their blood test results, can complete wellness surveys (that flag concerns to the clinical team) and can message their clinical team.
Best Healthcare Technology Solution of the Year – Nervecentre Software, mobile EPR
Nervecentre’s innovative mobile EPR technology provides clinical and operational teams in acute settings the real-time information they need to deliver safer, faster, high quality care.
‘Next Generation EPR’, harnessing a lightning-fast user interface on mobile and PCs to give clinical and operational teams access to timely and accurate patient information; anytime, anywhere. Its reach extends to the wider local health economy, connecting with STPs and ICOs as well as community partners and social care.
