Here, we present the finalists from the Health Tech Team of the Year category.
Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust
Overview: Liverpool Women’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (LWH) has recently completed a “revolutionary” digital organisational change programme which saw the implementation a brand new EPR system, MEDITECH Expanse. The implementation is said to be the first of type for the UK and went live on 8 July 2023.
Why? The legacy PAS system was implemented in 1996 and no longer met the complex digital demands of a modern NHS trust. Due to the age of the legacy system, the programme was described as a digital ‘heart and lung transplant’. It highlighted the lack of core functionality available with regards to an EPR.
What happened? The programme was branded as digiCare, reflecting the journey to both implement a new EPR and connect all other systems. The trust ran workshops, drop-in sessions, focus groups and many more as well as having a weekly dedicated newsletter, WhatsApp comms announcement group and website. At the heart of the entire programme there was a strong and dedicated clinical digital and programme delivery team which enabled a clinically led programme with the focus on patient safety and clinical processes. The trust established new processes in many areas which allowed staff to work much more efficiently and effectively and also published a ’start, stop & continue’ exercise, which was praised by NHS England. The data migration process was led by the trust team and was highlighted following go live as a significant success. Since go-live, some of the highlights have been integration with every downstream clinical system; a unique, bespoke maternity interface to fully integrate referrals, deliveries and births with the maternity system; and digitisation of clinical letters for outpatients. Staff have live Referral to Treatment, improving waiting list management, and live digital whiteboards within clinical areas to provide clinical oversight improved and more timely reporting internally and externally.
Looking ahead. It is hoped that this work has paved the way for other NHS trusts to do the same.
The Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust and Open Medical
Overview: The Northern Care Alliance (NCA) collaborated with Open Medical to streamline their skin cancer teledermatology pathway using PathpointⓇ eDerma. This partnership improved efficiency, reduced diagnosis time, increased accessibility, addressed health inequalities, and proved cost-effective.
Why? The NCA skin cancer pathway is overwhelmed with increasing demand and is the most challenged clinical pathway in Greater Manchester, with backlogs peaking at over 500 patients waiting over 62 days. Urgent transformative solutions were required to rapidly mobilise a new out-of-hospital diagnostic pathway.
What happened? The NCA and Open Medical partnered to redesign and optimise their service delivery with eDerma, facilitated by Greater Manchester Cancer Investment through national SBRI technology funding. This led to the development of a project targeted at increasing community-based diagnostics, diagnostic efficiency, and service accessibility by leveraging Open Medical’s cloud-based platform, PathpointⓇ eDerma. This model made use of remote teledermatology, where a specialist examined patients’ skin lesions following image capture in a community setting. Before eDerma’s implementation, the NCA was struggling to meet the Two-Week-Wait (2WW) target; less than one percent of patients were seen within 14 days of referral, an issue largely due to the resource-intensive nature of traditional F2F consultations. However, just 3 months after the launch of the optimised pathway via eDerma, dermatologists were able to evaluate 99 percent of referrals within 14 days. Patients received their diagnoses an average of 6.4 days faster, and 50 percent of patients received their diagnosis 14 days sooner. 79 percent of patients assessed via eDerma received a clinical diagnosis or treatment plan within 28 days, compared to 16 percent before its implementation. Even after accounting for the cost of implementing eDerma, each consultation is £32 cheaper than traditional F2F consultations, with an independent evaluation estimating it could save over £18,261 in just six months compared to the previous pathway.
Looking ahead. It is hoped that this pathway will set a new standard for healthcare initiatives.
C2-Ai
Overview: The C2-Ai team is pioneering solutions to improve patient outcomes, ensure equity and resolve the biggest issues in healthcare. It has expanded its globally unique technology to now address issues that cost 80% of heathcare spending globally (>$6tn). This has been achieved through “above and beyond” dedication and hard work.
Why? C2-Ai platform offers a multi-layered response for the NHS increasing capacity while reducing harm/mortality, emergency admissions and the workload for nurses/clinicians.
What happened? C2-Ai delivers overlapping improvements to the NHS and beyond, including prioritisation of the waiting list effectively means the right patients are seen at the right time based on their clinical risk – in this area, the NHS has reported an eight percent reduction in emergency admissions, 125 bed-days saved per 1,000 patients, thousands of surgeon years of time potentially saved across NHS and £2bn NHS savings. Another improvement is increasing capacity across acute care provision in hospitals to increase capacity in beds and ICU for more operations through identifying and helping to resolve 900 percent more drivers of harm/mortality than today’s BI systems – for example, reducing surgical complications by 56 percent and triggers like AKI and sepsis by 83 percent in a leading hospital. The systems builds on 30 years of research and 450m episodes of care processed from 47 countries. These are combined with the prospective operation to derive a priority score – built on detailed mortality/complication risks for the patient today, and if the procedure is delayed.
Looking ahead. This has been adopted across the region and in over 30 percent of ICS’s in the NHS, been published in the BMJ and CUREUS with papers highlighting the accuracy of the system’s detailed clinical risk assessment. It has been recommended as an NHSX Blueprint and included in GIRFT guidelines for hospitals.
MEDDBASE
Overview: Two decades of democratising access to health tech innovation, starting with a mission to make interoperability a possibility.
Why? Will Temple spent the earlier days of his career helping medical facilities set up their technology infrastructure and quickly saw a pattern. Clinicians could only access their systems on-premise, which meant they were often stuck working late hours and unable to access their systems and medical records remotely.
What happened? Meddbase started as an EHR, meeting customer demands including clinical safety, information security, compliance and a complete digital journey covering booking, billing and reporting. Offering bespoke implementations, the team work closely with customers for onboarding, offering strategic workshops during implementation to help redefine their business process in light of the new capabilities the solution offers. The solution is designed to enable reporting on every aspect of the business, allowing the migration of data easily and without disrupting business continuity. Every feature or module in Meddbase originates from a challenge or a problem that healthcare customers were trying to solve, including scaling their operations, improving patient experience, or reducing admin for their clinicians.
Looking ahead. Meddbase is committed to propelling technological progress in the healthcare sector, particularly through the SaaS delivery model, and hopes to continue to enhance digital interoperability between private and public sector care providers.
