East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust has signed a deal with smart health tech provider, Alcidion, to secure early warning technology that will help detect patients who are deteriorating.
The tools will help staff enhance patient safety across five hospitals in East Lancashire, including the Royal Blackburn Teaching Hospital, Burnley General Teaching Hospital, Clitheroe Community Hospital, Accrington Victoria and Pendle Community Hospital.
The system – called Patientrack – is being introduced to help staff intervene early, to prevent harm when patients show signs of worsening conditions and allow them to be provided with urgent attention.
The mobile electronic observations technology will integrate with the trust’s Cerner Millennium system, as part of an electronic patient record deployment.
Nurses will be able to utilise the tech as they carry out observations, as it will integrate directly with bedside devices to capture patients’ vital signs. It will also automatically calculate a patient’s early warning score before alerting clinicians if and when they need to take action.
It’s hoped the deployment will end a reliance on paper-based processes, provide better visibility of the trust’s sickest patients and enable improved coordination across the five hospitals.
Smartpage – Alcidion’s smartphone and web-based system for hospital communication and task management – will also be deployed in parallel with Patientrack. This secure messaging system will integrate with the e-observations technology to push hard alerts to appropriate clinical teams. It’s hoped this will help hospitals move away from pagers, support night workloads and streamline patient handover between shifts.
Mark Johnson, Chief Information Officer at East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “We are driving forward our ambitions to enhance patient care and improve working life for staff through digital technology, both locally and in collaboration with our ICS colleagues across the region.
“Patientrack, which has delivered impressive results for patient safety in dozens of other NHS hospitals, accompanied by Smartpage, will be an important part of that digital roadmap and the deployment of our local EPR. We are confident that the experiences and learning from the deployment will support the regional objectives of having consolidated information for all patients. These are mobile technologies that our clinicians want to use, that can help to alleviate pressure and remove manual processes, and that can have a very immediate impact on patient outcomes and safety.”
Lynette Ousby, UK managing director for Alcidion, added: “Now more than ever, clinicians need digital tools that make their lives easier, and that make the right thing to do the easiest thing to do. East Lancashire Hospitals is showing its desire to accelerate digital adoption on a significant scale very quickly.”
