In Focus: HTN Awards 2020 Part One

Kate Warriner, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Alder Hey, said:  “An extraordinary amount has been accomplished in the digital space at Alder Hey over the past year, and we are thrilled to achieve this award in recognition of that. In the face of unprecedented challenges, our Digital teams worked together with clinicians, innovation colleagues and other internal and external partners to achieve the seemingly impossible; delivering what was required to support our children and young people, their families and our staff.”

“We have worked with a true sense of team spirit, passion, energy and good humour not to just deliver solutions, but also to support each other through a year of massive challenges for the Trust and for the world. As we move forward, we will continue to build on these achievements, and to harness the positive outlook many staff and patients now have towards digital technologies in moving the Trust even further along in its digital futures journey.”

The Trust also quickly responded with innovations during the year: “When the Coronavirus crisis hit, we saw it was essential to implement Telemedicine immediately to support remote clinical decision-making. The Neonatal Partnership brings together Liverpool Women’s Hospital and Alder Hey in clinically supporting neonates. Numerous individuals from the teams at both sites pulled together, working with InTouch Health to go from nothing to a full telemedicine service in just two weeks. This involved purchasing new telemedicine robots, funded by Alder Hey Children’s Charity.”

Joanne Minford, Consultant Paediatric Surgeon at Alder Hey, said: “I can see both how much the system has helped the Partnership weather COVID-19, and how it can help us to continue to improve care for babies in the future. The simplicity of the system, which is very intuitive and the reduction of travel time has meant we can make decisions quickly and with all the information we need. Parents seem to love it too – I can answer all the questions Mums and Dads have in a very natural way.”

Best use of AI

Microsoft Research – InnerEye, Democratising AI for Medical Image Analysis

Best Use of Data

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust

Staff from all parts of the hospital came together to make sure they could monitor staffing levels, PPE kit levels, pathology turnaround times, oxygen status, bed occupancy, and all the other issues introduced by the crisis.

This involved reporting twice a day to the internal command centre on a trust-wide call. It involved regular updates to public health colleagues; local council, and partners in clinical commissioning, community hospitals, mental health and police.

The digital dashboards created provided instant data on; green and red bed capacity across two acute hospitals, closed wards and empty beds, number of COVID patients, number of swabs and results, staff testing numbers and results, actual staffing on every shift broken down by role, intensive care bed space, oxygen supplies available and remaining, patients receiving oxygen and how, numbers on ventilation, gown stocks, hygiene product stocks and further data.

Health Tech Team of the Year

Connected Nottinghamshire – for the digital programme across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Integrated Care System

Connected Nottinghamshire is the digital programme across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Integrated Care System and has, ensuring co-design and co-production of both the workforce and population, brought together data from local and national systems to enable Nottinghamshire residents to access digital tools, information and services; empowering them to drive their own health outcomes, take control and become experts in their health, care and wellbeing.

Alexis Farrow, Head of Strategy and Transformation at Connected Nottinghamshire, said: “The Connected Nottinghamshire Public Facing Digital Services Strategy was produced in 2018 after 18 months of public engagement, which included, attending local events and community groups.  This enabled us to develop a strategy that not only meets our contractual and policy requirements but most importantly was designed around our people, taking into account socio-economic factors which they may face.  We wanted to develop our digital first approach around our people so that we provided them with the digital tools to benefit them and improved patient experience, satisfaction and quality of care.

“Some of the key feedback identified from our people was that wanted access to trusted and easy to understand information in one place across the whole health and care system. We responded to this by utilising the NHS App as the ‘single front door’ to all public- facing digital services. Furthermore, we wanted to enhance this offering to our population by integrating further functionality into the NHS App.  In doing so, we selected Patients Know Best as the regional, system wide personal health record (PHR) of choice, which is the first and only PHR to utilise NHS login and integrate with the NHS App. This offers our population what no other healthcare provider has delivered previously with seamless access to primary care, secondary care, community care, mental health and social care digital services, directly from the trusted and accessible national NHS platform.

“We have also recognised that there are cohorts of our population that are more likely to be digitally and socially excluded as a result of a digital- first approach.  We undertook an extremely detailed review of our population in order to understand the individual localities across our geography that were more likely to become digitally and socially excluded as a result of this.  We identified that in areas where there was a higher risk of exclusion which fell in line with the levels of deprivation across our county and identified the key socio-economic factors which might exacerbate this.

“Operationally we have put in place a number of schemes, which have supported over 600 people across our communities, to reduce health, care and digital inequalities such as; digital hubs on the high street, running drop- in centres at library’s in our most excluded areas, trained over 60 digital health champions across the NHS and community providers, tablet lending scheme, telephone and email support line.   We are also working with a local training provider to offer further basic digital skills training across our workforce, train our workforce as digital champions and offer specific training to encourage women into technical roles.

“Connected Nottinghamshire are delighted to have won the 2020 HTN award for ‘Health Tech Team of the Year’.  As a relatively small team, each member has shown extreme commitment, passion and innovation over the past 12 months in order to deliver digital solutions to meet the needs of both the workforce and the population of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire.”

Best Health Tech Solution of the Year

Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health for the Digital Child Growth Assessment programme

“Growth is an important indicator of a child health and for decades the state of the art has been plotting growth onto charts printed on paper or card.

“But as digital transformation is reshaping almost every aspect of our lives, paper charts just don’t cut it anymore, and as hospital and GP paper notes over the years have given way to the electronic record, no one has quite known what to do with the charts. The challenge with switching to growth charts in a digital form is that the maths behind these charts is complex and the dataset they rely on for calculations is difficult to understand.

“So a few months ago we have taken a bold step to build an application programme interface (API), and with a small team of developers, childhood growth specialists and a statistician, we have written a code which is fundamentally changing the paradigm. It wraps around those complex steps involved in calculating a child’s measurement, into an easy-to-use layer that any hospital, GP system provider or mobile app developer can use for their clinician- or parent-facing products, speeding up development spectacularly.

“This model of developing ‘best practice as code’ is brand new in the world of Royal Colleges and other medical standards-setting organisations. Our project is the first of its type anywhere in the world. This could spark the beginning in a new phase in the way those organisations engage with technology and for our College especially – it is a remarkably thoughtful investment in the future of child health.”

London Ambulance Service and Abbott plc for the Online Diagnostic Ambulance project

The aim of this pilot was to see if it was feasible to utilise point-of-care testing devices used normally within an A&E setting at an even earlier stage by placing them within ambulances. These could speed up clinical decision making, reduce congestion, and improve patient waiting times in busy hospital A&E departments.

To test the concept, an i-Stat blood gas analyser was supplied to three London Ambulance Service emergency response cars, with training provided for the advanced paramedic team. In the initial phase the analyser was used to test for blood electrolytes, lactate, and blood gases, delivering test results within two minutes.

During the seven month feasibility study period the equipment was used on 65 of 697 patients attended. The results were of value in determining immediate interventions and referral pathways, and for 40 patients emergency department admission was avoided.

The next phase of the project will look at connectivity of these devices to both the London Ambulance Service and a local emergency department, so that test results can be electronically transferred to systems at these destinations.

The concept could potentially save numerous patient lives as it could be used for earlier identification of specific cardiac markers such as troponin and earlier identification of sepsis.

Efficiency Savings of the Year

NHS Shared Business Service 

NHS SBS is saving hundreds of thousands of employee hours every year after deploying robots to carry out repetitive financial processing tasks. The robots work round-the-clock on behalf of over 200 NHS organisations, improving speed and accuracy, delivering greater efficiencies, and enhancing NHS user experience.

Stephen Sutcliffe, Director of Finance and Accounting at NHS Shared Business Services: “To win a Health Tech Award is a great achievement for our Robotic Process Automation (RPA) team and really validates our digital first approach to NHS corporate services. The fact the judges represent such a range of frontline NHS organisations makes it all the more satisfying to be recognised for our contribution to NHS innovation. We’re now looking forward to the next steps on our automation journey – helping the NHS deploy robots and other cutting-edge technologies that deliver significant benefits for healthcare systems around the country.”

The partnership said: “Through our partnerships we have been able to ensure that our products are both professionally-led and technically informed, while remaining focused on individual’s healthcare needs.”

“This joint contribution and dedication to digital healthcare has allowed us to push boundaries and achieve great things over the past 12-months such as launching eight new solutions, including our COVID Virtual ward, which allows patients to be monitored safely at home by clinical teams using real-time data, and our Digital Care Home tool which allows seamless electronic referrals from care homes to clinical teams using a secure portal.”

Ian Dove, director at Health Call, said: “The combination of technology, specialist teams and effective collaborations allows us to make a real difference via intuitive health and care solutions. This award is testament to the tireless work of our team and colleagues across the seven NHS Foundation Trusts in the North East and North Cumbria, and I couldn’t be prouder.”