This category of the HTN Awards 2022 focuses on health tech programmes of work, projects, services, software and teams that have been making a demonstrable impact on healthcare across the last 12 months or so – whether that’s for staff, patients, or across the board.
We hope you enjoy reading all the submissions to the HTN Now Awards 2022’s ‘Making an Impact’ category, below. Return to our social channels on 20 January 2022, at 7pm, to find out who our expert panel of judges have chosen as the winner, from this fantastic catalogue of finalists’ work…
Ashtons Hospital Pharmacy Services
During 2021, Ashtons Hospital Pharmacy Services, launched the Ashtons e-Works ePMA system, creating an immediate impact. Prescribing errors have reduced by 88 per cent and medicines administration errors by 94 per cent. They estimate e-Works has prevented 49 incidents which would likely have led to long-term patient harm or death during 2021; around 1.25 per site.
Ashtons’ research highlighted that some ePMA systems were designed primarily for large NHS trusts. One of its key aims was to improve patient safety in healthcare facilities, specifically through the effective management of medication. The reduction of errors is a primary part of achieving that, so they developed and created their own ePMA system, to provide a solution for the healthcare facilities the team work with. This has developed into the system now known as Ashtons e-Works.
e-Works users can manage patients’ prescriptions and review the administration of medication remotely, 24/7. It replaces paper medication records, such as prescription charts, and is transformational in improving the safe prescribing and administration of medication, the hospital said. It also ensures faster access to medication, reduces duplications of patient records and helps to free up staff time.
Ashtons’ e-Works includes decision support software which advises clinicians about medicine doses, potential adverse drug interactions, and contra indications such as potential drug allergic reactions.
Following its full launch earlier this year, 39 hospitals and hospices are now contracted as e-Works clients. Error rates were measured in the six months prior to implementation. A three-month window was then allowed following implementation, then error rates were measured again in the following six months. As well as the aforementioned reduction in administration and prescribing errors, there was also a 92 per cent reduction in patient details errors.
They also recently conducted a user experience survey, which showed: 92 per cent agree e-works is easy to learn how to use and 93 per cent agreed e-Works reduces the potential for administration errors, among other results.
Royal Papworth NHS Foundation Trust and Dedalus
The migration of Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust’s Electronic Patient Record (EPR) to the cloud has improved resilience of the EPR.
Royal Papworth Hospital embraced the move to the cloud of its EPR through its strategic partner Dedalus’ Healthcare Platform. The platform is hosted on Amazon Public Cloud and leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Computing Services and AWS Managed Services (AMS). The entry said it provides the trust with a highly resilient secure service leveraging multiple “availability zones”, within AWS Public Cloud.
Through the cloud service, the analysis of transactions and processes enables compute power to be tailored for the trust’s needs, with the ability to flex data processing power at the trust level. Greater flexibility from being on the cloud means that Royal Papworth can benefit from making local choices relating to upgrades, configuration, and training. For example, additional training environments can be stood up quickly to reflect peak training periods and they can choose when to do required upgrades.
Delivering the solution on the cloud means that outages are no longer required to support disaster recovery testing and the adoption of security patches at the trust. The ability to continuously adopt platform releases and patches provides the trust with an evergreen service delivering improved performance, new capabilities, features and an enhanced level of resilience and security through global surveillance centre services. The Dedalus Healthcare Cloud service also includes an additional layer of security through a “digital fortress” by preventing access at the trust instance level. This is in addition to the perimeter protection already in place at the data centre level.
The trust is now also benefiting from a set of common shared platform services such as remote access, deployment automation, network security and monitoring.
Andrew Raynes, CIO, Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, comments: “Speed of access to information is critical and since the move of our EPR to the cloud we are seeing a wealth of benefits including reduced costs, better security and reliability, as well as greater flexibility, performance, scalability and availability. The cloud unlocks many more possibilities for data-driven care as we move into an era that is beyond the traditional EPR, utilising open standards to share information readily.”
Alcidion
Working alongside NHS colleagues in Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Alcidion supported the Acute Medical team in moving from pagers to SmartPage, a digital communication system. This freed up two hours of responding to bleeps in a typical 12-hour shift and users reported significant improvements in efficiency and safety.
Smartpage is an advanced smartphone and web-based system for hospital communication and task management, addressing the requirements of both clinical and non-clinical users. It facilitates rapid, reliable and comprehensive messaging, with two-way closed loop communication, task-management and comprehensive handover.
Alcidion were commissioned to implement and support the transformation from the traditional analogue pager, to a digital strategy. With the implementation of Smartpage, nurses can quickly enter details of their task, along with all patient information that a doctor would require. They can see that the message has been sent to the doctor, when the doctor has seen their message, and receive responses back. Remote opinions can also be sought, with images of rashes, ECG shared securely.
Clinical teams were engaged during implementation by strong clinical leaders within Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and ensured that the leadership of the transformation took into account the complex human factors that exist around a frenetic environment such as the acute medical on-call.
Prior to implementation, time and motions studies were undertaken to measure the time spent directly responding to bleeps. A typical 12-hour shift was associated with two hours of time spent answering and responding to bleeps. The make up of these bleeps was highly varied, but significantly 15 per cent of bleeps were missed, and 20 per cent of bleeps documented were for the wrong person.
Implementation took place within 24 hours within the acute medical team, on one hospital site. The administrative burden of responding to bleeps was eradicated, and replaced with an intuitive digital task list that was held on mobile devices. A typical on call shift has three Foundation Doctors, and one Senior Clinician over a 12 hour period, equating to 16 hours of clinical time saved every 24 hours.
Beyond this significant time saving captured, clearer notes were reported with reduced transcription errors. Clinicians were able to prioritise their tasks based on the digital work list, and this also formed the cornerstone of handover through different shifts. Additionally, colleagues were able to select tasks held by others within their team to ensure that people were prioritised on need and not just whom happened to be working the fastest. The programme is now going to be rolled out across all medical, surgical and paediatric wards within the trust with key savings to clinician time, clinical care and safety all expected.
DuraScience Inc.
The U.S. patent of Sucralez™ is a nutritional supplement composition that aims to help with metabolic control, better cardiovascular control, and better resistance to diabetic cravings. According to the company, Sucralez is a combination of flaxseed extract, garlic extract and shiitake extract that research has shown to reduce total and LDL-cholesterol in the blood and decrease diabetic complications.
As per DuraScience, in the study of Sucralez effectiveness, focused primarily on diabetic considerations, participants reported the following results: 92 per cent of participants reported decreased blood sugar levels, with a response of typically 25 per cent reduction in two-hour postprandial sugar level. In addition to decreased blood sugar levels, there were results of better results on metabolic control, an increase in serum HDL (high density lipoprotein), better cardiovascular control, improved microbacterial environment in the intestine, and an overall decrease in diabetic complications.
DuraScience says Sucralez ingredients each have their own benefits and work together to help people that have been diagnosed with diabetes. Although the main goal for Sucralez is to benefit people with diabetes, each ingredient has its own advantages. The company says every ingredient is used internationally for different illnesses and that, once it restores and enhances the body’s cells, the composition can go on to boost cell strength and maximise physical and mental abilities. It then goes on to help maintain the long-lasting quality of the cells and delay cellular deterioration.
Wellbeing Software
Determined to transform the patient experience digitally, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust partnered with Wellbeing Software to implement eConsent, a clinician-led, paperless solution to radically streamline consent to the treatment processes during COVID.
The trust, like so many up and down the country, are on a journey to digitally transform their workflow in line with the HIMSS electronic medical record adoption model. The entry said, “this is to not only increase the efficiency of their workflows but to ensure that patient care is being continuously improved upon at every point of contact”.
To become more digitally mature, they sought the help of connected healthcare specialist Wellbeing Software to implement eConsent, a clinician-led, digital solution that enhances patient consent consultations. In addition to this being a part of a wider national scheme, Royal Berkshire wanted to use eConsent to improve the patient experience, optimise consultant time, as well as improve access to standardised and up to date information throughout their consent to the treatment process.
The solution enables digital consent forms to be created dynamically, pre-populated with individual patient demographics and shared with the patient in the context of the proposed procedure, along with information leaflets during the consultation.
By introducing eConsent, the trust has also been able to report on, analyse and further optimise the consent process, which would not be available via a paper process. For example:
- Consent form usage across a specific date range showing them the number of procedures by department, which can then be further filtered down to show both procedure type and numbers by consenting clinicians.
- Remote form access shows which forms have been accessed, downloaded and/or signed by a remote link across a specific date range.
- Access to ‘raw’ consent data that is provided weekly for the trust, for analysis, by their own Business Intelligence team.
