Last night there was an emotional tribute with people around the UK taking part in a “Clap for Carers” act to say thank you to the NHS and care workers dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.
During the week millions have also taken to social media to say thank you and hundreds of thousands have responded with help to become volunteers, the country has truly come together.
A moving video on twitter here captured the sentiment well.
On Sunday last week HTN launched a call to celebrate, recognise and say thank you to those in health tech making a real difference.
Each week we will highlight these people, teams and organisations nominated, and say thank you from HTN. You can nominate your Health Tech Hero here.
The Health Tech Heroes this week:
Automation Team at East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust
Darren Atkins, CTO said “We have saved 57 hours in time so far this week… time that can be spent supporting patients and not filling in spreadsheets!”
Last week the team helped with automating the handling of incoming requests from care homes in London to access NHS mail. 3 automated processes were created that receive application forms from care homes via email, analyse supplied data to ensure it is accurate, automatically create account creation spreadsheets in Excel, and manage all the communications between the various parties.
Connected Nottinghamshire Team
Nicole Atkinson, Nottinghamshire ICS Clinical lead & South Notts ICP Clinical lead said “I would like to nominate the team who are working every hour god sends to keep Nottingham primary care up and running and working remotely. Some of the work coming soon is truly revolutionary.”
Paul Blade, Head of Applications at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust
Melanie Ince, Applications Manager said “Paul fought for the team to be able to work from home staying connected using laptops and remote technology, Microsoft Teams, shared systems and regular conference calls. He kept us all informed with regular updates which boosted our morale and allowed us to continue to work to keep valuable clinical patient data and systems available to our clinical colleagues.”
Inhealthcare Team and City Health Care Partnership
Mark Filby, Information Systems Programme Manager, Mike Cosgrove, Business and Service Development Advisor at City Health Care Partnership and Jamie Innes, Product Director at Inhealthcare.
Mark, Mike and Jamie worked tirelessly to deploy digital health services that screen citizens due to attend appointments to ensure they do not have symptoms associated with COVID-19 as well as remotely monitoring care home residents to reduce face-to-face contact.
The service screens citizens due for appointments to ensure they do not have symptoms associated with COVID-19. A citizens is contacted via an automated telephone call or SMS and asks them to complete a symptom questionnaire.
Jack Ciezak- Infrastructure Manager, The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust
Stuart Hanlon, Head of Technical Services said “It’s more like what does Jack not do! Jack has been working 6 days a week for the last 2 months (Saturdays we’ve been working on Windows 10 deployment but now working on Covid IT solutions). One minute Jack is helping to build laptops, the next minute he is building an entirely new VPN solution. Whatever the priority of the day (or hour!) Jack is on hand to help. There is nothing that this guy cannot achieve. But the most incredible thing is that he always does it with a smile and positive attitude. I didn’t even mention all the work he does in the evenings in his own time!”
Jaydee Dolphine, Swindon CCG IT
Terry Walker, Westrop Medical Practice said “Over the last week or so Jaydee has been responsible for preparing IT equipment for Doctors, Nurses and Administrators who are forced to self isolate due to COVID19. Jaydee has prepared all the equipment than delivered them to home addresses of staff. She has gone above and beyond in making sure staff are able to contribute in our fight against COVID19 even though they are self isolating. These deliveries have sometimes meant she has had to contend with armed guards when trying to deliver IT equipment to staff on military bases or even setting up equipment in peoples gardens to avoid coming too close to people who are self isolating. Jaydee has been a huge help to us and without her we may have even had to close some of our Surgeries.”
Dr Hussain Ghandi, The Wellspring Surgery
Dr Ghandi has been providing great resources and tips for primary care to embrace video consultations and new ways of working.
The Electronic Health Record System (EHRS) team at University College London Hospital (UCLH)
Judith Dibsdale, Clinical Systems Designer said “Responded to the rapidly changing needs of the service to update Covid-19 test ordering and resulting and reconfigure the build and workflows needed within the Epic EPR, including updating Medical Device Integration and facility structure and reworking the services provided in various areas to enable staff to responsively and safely adapt and care for the rapidly increasing needs of Covid-19 patients.”
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust Informatics Department
Tracey Whitfield, Head of EHR Delivery “The teams have been amazing, They are all supporting each other, asking where they can help to get equipment built and out to staff who don’t normally use IT to work from home. They are offering to support the clinical areas by redeploying to any supporting role needed. They are running online training courses to speed up the role out of video consultation solutions to support patients having access to clinicians without having to come to the hospital. They are all demonstrating the Leeds Way Values that underpin our organisation and I could not be more proud of them all!”
Dr Geoffrey Avery and the staff of Blyth Road Medical Centre
Dr Avery is currently working 7 days a week from 7:00am to 9:00pm – where one GP is supporting almost 6,000 patients.
Listers Unified Communications
Teresa Hinder, Practice Manager, Brockworth Surgery said “Tom Lister and his team provide our telephone system in a 9800 patient GP Practice, we found our system unable to cope with the sheer volume of calls coming into the practice as well as Doctors needing to triage , therefore all our lines were blocked constantly , with the first 24 hours they were onsite and provided us with 10 extra lines and phones and have also supplied us with extra phones and wifi dongles enabling the drs that are in isolation and working from home to link into practice phone system they have continued to go above and beyond delivering phones etc within hours of our requests truly deserve to be health tech heroes.”
AccuRx and their founder Jacob Haddad
Dr Hussain Ghandi said “When COVID hit, AccuRx rapidly delivered video consultation software for practices to use to keep patients and staff safe. Additionally resources to send items like information and certification to patients via sms and reduce footfall at practices and help with social distancing and self isolation. In my view they have saved lives in this pandemic and need recognition for their work.”
Joanna Bircher, GP Partner, Lockside Medical Centre “Absolutely understand the world of front line general practice. Fabulous products, user friendly. Company fast and responsive, quickly responding to feedback and designing software with the users at the heart of everything. The best thing that has happened to General Practuce IT in my 21 year GP career.”
Yvonne Bailey, IT Lead, Queen Square Medical Practice “They have always been fantastic at responding to the NHS requirements with simple to use SMS and information gathering software. As soon as the virus hit they provided further support with templates and their video software was a godsend, we couldn’t have managed without them these last few weeks and that deserves recognition!”
