What benefits can intelligence in the track and trace space offer healthcare, and what does the future look like for this kind of technology? HTN sat down for a chat with Nick Westall, chief technology officer at Athera Healthcare, to find out his thoughts.
Athera works with a range of healthcare customers – predominantly the NHS in the UK and across the HSE in Ireland – to improve patient outcomes by bringing together data-driven insights, technology and personalised strategy. Within this, Nick is responsible for all things tech, from products to the service delivered to customers. He brings experience in a variety of areas across the industry, usually focusing on supporting organisations to realise ambitions around digital transformation or assisting with tackling challenges.
Key challenges
As a company, Athera Healthcare is growing by acquisition as well as organically, so Nick noted that integrating organisations can be a challenge; particularly when it comes to developing a synergy for growth and achieving productivity. Additionally, through the acquisitions that Athera is making along with some already made, the organisation has solutions under its umbrella which have been in existence for nearly 30 years. This raises a challenge, Nick said, in ensuring that these products stay relevant, offer up-to-date functionality, and can be expanded for wider use.
“There’s also the fragmentation of healthcare environments. The NHS has over 580 different software packages in use. More often than not, we find that there are gaps between those systems which are being filled manually – they are instantly out of date and you end up with islands of data as a result needing to be brought together from different sources. You can do that manually, and it might be simple enough if you are trying to solve one particular problem, but the next time there’s a need to solve a different problem the work needs to be redone. It’s highly inefficient and ineffective.”
Integration between Athera’s systems and others is a key focus moving ahead, Nick explained, along with “the business intelligence and healthcare intelligence that sits on top of that. so that we can help the clinicians understand what it is they can do within their environment to achieve better patient outcomes?’ Our aim is to help them work as efficiently, effectively and fast as they can, with real-time updates.”
Intelligence in track and trace
Nick shared some of his views on the role of intelligence in healthcare, particularly in the track and trace space with regards to what this technology can help with at present and what we might see in the future.
“Every single customer I speak with wants greater intelligence from the information that they already have,” said Nick. “They want to bring those islands of information together. Some organisations are making good progress in this area; some have really strong plans that are well advanced in terms of trying to integrate particular systems. We are actively driving that at present for our customers.”
Nick noted that there has been “fantastic feedback” from customers about how they can use Athera’s products to share and analyse, in comparison to competing software. “This has allowed our customers to make massive changes in terms of how they operate, improve their efficiency and effectiveness, and reduce costs whilst improving services.”
Athera’s solutions in practice
Across the HSE in Ireland, Athera is the sole provider for sterile services solutions with its FingerPrint product, and is also driving the integration of information to provide a single view to track equipment and implants. “We’re bringing integration and information from all implant providers proactively, to help hospitals and clinicians to understand what resources they have and ensure that they have the right implant for the right patient.”
Athera is also working with loan set providers (enabling the ordering of implants and instruments for scheduled surgeries), to integrate their operations, equipment and data “swiftly and easily into hospital records, and then back again. This supports the loan set providers to work efficiently, and it also means that hospitals are only taking the equipment that they specifically need and therefore investing smartly. It also helps them to better understand their own resourcing.”
On recent positive feedback from NHS customers, showcasing the impact of solutions, Nick said: “This has been achieved by making some manual processes more efficient and automated. It’s everything that we would hope a customer is able to say; that they are doing more with less, and they are doing it faster. We’re looking to drive this approach across each of our customers and support others to benefit in the same way.”
Plans for the immediate future…
Nick described how the work in our product roadmap will involve “accelerating the integration for both our existing products and those that are going to be on the new system, bringing in business intelligence capability and enhancing and extending what we already do.”
There are plans to enhance Athera Insights, which is designed to help organisations manage national audits and data collection projects, to drive research and improve patient outcomes.
“In the NHS, that’s a four-stage process, and our products and software very much support the second stage around data collection and analysis. Our goals are to support the whole audit process, helping our customers to really drive improvements in patient outcomes across the whole healthcare organisation.
… and in five years’ time
“Along with providing a broader suite of solutions for customers at operational, tactical and strategic level, we’ll also be proactively integrating together many more systems for our customers so they can save money and stop spending time trying to understand the full picture. They’ll have complete visibility across their organisation, providing them with the insight they need to drive progress. It will become a positive cycle of improvement for them.”
Nick expects to see greater consistency and scope of use of existing products. He noted existing inefficiencies such as loan sets getting ordered but not actually used, but still requiring cleaning; and the fact that equipment within hospitals sometimes does not get scanned as it should, meaning that its journey and location cannot be traced.
“I think we will see an increased level of automatic tracking of equipment like this within hospitals and between them, and also between providers. This means they will be able to drive out unnecessary stock from within the supply chain and they will also be able to ensure that equipment is proactively in the right place at the right time. This will reduce the costs to hospitals and providers alike, while delivering more operations. That will become the norm and the default, as opposed to a heavy manual process that has to be undertaken today.”
Another prediction is that there will be “much greater collaboration between organisations in the supply chain,” said Nick, noting that organisations tend to be aware of the data they hold and its quality – and the fact that it only offers one perspective on a situation. “Being able to bring in other perspectives makes everyone’s data more valuable.”
Health tech for the future
What is Nick most excited about for the future, when it comes to the health tech landscape?
“I’m excited about the breadth and the scale of the opportunities provided by health tech and the healthcare setting,” said Nick. “At the moment it is hugely fragmented, and there’s a lot of data out there but the problem is the quality.”
He also commented on the surge in artificial intelligence in this sector. “One of the greatest challenges we have is for AI to actually deliver the benefits that it has the potential for. And that comes back to the need for good quality data.”
Thank you to Nick for sharing his insights.
