At our Digital Primary Care conference last month, we hosted a variety of live webcasts and discussion sessions from healthcare providers, NHS representatives and industry experts.
We’ve been recapping some of the sessions over the past month, with one of the most topical for September being Eva Health’s talk on the company’s eVacc co-admin solution for the COVID-19 and flu vaccine roll-out.
Maddy Phipps-Taylor, Eva Health CEO and Danny Stone, the company’s Head of Marketing, provided the presentation on what eVacc can offer to GP practices and other care settings involved in the national vaccination programmes this winter. They also fielded questions from the audience in a live Q&A session.
Following the announcement yesterday about the latest COVID booster roll-out cohorts, and the news that flu and COVID shots can be administered at the same time, we take a look back at what Eva Health had to say…
Maddy, who we also interviewed earlier this year about Eva’s pilot of the point-of-care vaccination platform, said: “We’re partnering with you – with bold organisations who are willing to step up to the plate and make a change. We can have that conversation… making sure that it’s the right step for you. We’ve done everything we can to reduce the risk of changing, so that’s really important. It is a fair concern that you have about switching IT systems, it’s just the headache you don’t want to have. But sometimes you have to be bold to get to a better place.”
“We’re building smarter health and wellbeing records, so really this is part of our journey – we don’t stop here. We’ve got grand ambitions for where we’d like to go,” she said.
On eVacc from Eva, the first module in the platform, Maddy stated: “What would you be getting if you were using it? Reliability – we’ve had zero per cent downtime in the two-and-a-half months we’ve been live. You’d have resilience – we’ve been scaling this up to, and testing, half a million jabs a day.
“Our pilot site has declared that they were seeing a saving of 20 seconds per vaccination – over what they were doing before…it depends on your flow but some people are definitely seeing different time savings per vaccination. Hopefully with our co-administration flow, which we’re going to show you, we’re going to maintain, if not increase, that.”
Discussing user feedback so far, Maddy added: “We’ve had some excellent user experience feedback. We’re listening, we are trying to get that feedback, we’ve made quite a lot of different changes to the product and try get them out quickly…it [the system] is quick to pick up, there’s not much to say [as] it’s so self-explanatory, it’s super easy.”
Of the nine ‘mini upgrades’ Eva have already undertaken, she said: “We are constantly improving, we are constantly adding things, we’re listening to feedback, ‘oh I don’t like how this comes up, I want to change it…can we do that?’ – we are actively listening, refining and then putting it back into the software.”
“Part of the opportunity to change systems is that we can double run with clinical systems for a time, which allows you to gradually onboard users. You don’t have a ‘big bang’, it’s not a big switch on one day [where] it’s chaotic for the first couple of hours and everyone is exhausted by the end of the day. No, that’s not how we’ve been seeing it work in practice, it’s not what we’d recommend,” she stated.
Instead, what Eva does recommend is that, “you pick a few people working on a shift who feel confident with technology. We train them and then it’s a train-the-trainer approach – you can scale up as fast or as slow as you like. Typically, we plan for slow and it’s always been faster than expected. Once I did it in 24 hours.”
Summing up the solution, Maddy commented that it’s “fully NHS Digital- assured for the point-of-care solution” and noted that “it’s smart – we’re doing this as a co-admin flow and we’re building it that way to try and minimise the clicks.”
This, she added, is from a “clinical safety perspective – if you are going to be delivering co-admin, [which is] still a choice or an option, it’s in the same solution so you can identify if COVID and flu have been delivered as a co-administration…should there be any adverse reactions that come as a result.”
“We integrate to all the things you need to integrate to, to be able to deliver the service…and it is free [as] NHS England are paying the bill for our software. It is free for you guys to use, if you choose to do so. Lastly, it’s simple – a singe-point-of-care-solution for both COVID and flu, enhanced workflows that make it as easy as possible to do things right and to know when you’re doing things wrong and to stop you from doing that,” she concluded.
Maddy then handed over to Danny, who demoed the eVacc software, beginning with the log-in page, all the way through to how to search by patient or NHS number, as well as validation, choices of flow for co-admin, eligibility, vaccination-type, consent, and more.
“We’ve made it really, really simple,” he said, “you come in, you see the list of sites that you’re registered at by your super-users and we actually work on a role-based access system, as well. Then you can actually manage the different users’ roles, site-by-site.”
On the warnings within the system, Maddy added: “We tried to make the warnings stand out, so that they pop-out at you when something happens. Obviously, we’re not going to stop you from doing something that might be clinically relevant – for example, someone might have had their first dose abroad and it might not appear in any of the NHS systems or in NIMMS, so it might be right to give that person a second dose when there is no first dose on the record. In that case, we’re not going to stop you from doing it, we’re just suggesting you write a note.”
The biggest user site’s busiest day, Danny said, was around 1,300 jabs in one day – “it really is built for scale”, he added, before taking the audience through the section on how to log patients’ adverse reactions, as well as how the system tracks performance and provides useful data.
Maddy and Danny then moved on to answering some of the viewers’ questions, which you can watch in full, along with the demo and entire presentation, below:
