“Initially, there was a fear among healthcare staff that these would replace face-to-face meetings, but if we can use digital and virtual as a precursor to in-person sessions, we make the in-person sessions so much richer and more valuable.”
The success of this remote provision of healthcare has led the Trust to roll this out across the network and use the technology in other fields.
Also, neonatal and maternity units across the UK are using a service called BadgerNet that enables midwives to record notes on maternity patients in real-time, whether they are in the hospital, the community or at home.
“Previously, we had to write up our patient notes onto three separate systems,” says Victoria Mustafa, a digital midwife at Epsom and St. Helier NHS Trust. “Through recording notes in real-time, tasks that previously took us an hour now take us just five minutes. It’s really been transformational for our team. As we have the woman’s whole journey at our fingertips, from any location, at any time, the level of care we can offer to expectant and new mothers is exceptional.”
Mustafa says giving patient care teams a single view of maternity information has also allowed them to reduce the time new mothers stay in the hospital, freeing up beds and allowing nurses to spend more time with patients who need extra care. She estimates the BadgerNet system is saving the Trust around £100,000 a year through efficiencies.
In Denmark, Emergency Medical Service Copenhagen has been using Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service to help screen people for potential COVID-19 infection and treatment. It is also being used to arrange an average of 90.000 tests a day at national level.
Powered by Microsoft Azure, the service is now developing artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing technology to help organizations create their own bots — in which the data is owned and solely accessible by the organization — to respond to inquiries and free up doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals so they can provide critical care to patients who need it. Since March, health organizations have created 2,311 COVID-19 self-assessment bots based on the Microsoft Healthcare bot service, reaching 75 million individuals.
“Our emergency hotline is almost back to normal, as with the help of the bot, most inquiries are routed to other solutions and the respective departments taking pressure off our nurses and freeing up valuable time,“ says Freddy Lippert, CEO, Copenhagen Emergency Medical Service. He adds: “We can translate the benefits into many other areas of emergency care. If we bring AI into the interviews we have with patients calling our emergency number and combine it with the data we already have, such as medication, previous admission, diagnosis, etc., the quality of the consultation goes up, allowing us to do a risk profile for the patient in no time. It will revolutionize dispatch systems and decision-supporting systems – with only 90 seconds to dispatch the right resource, having all the data at hand significantly supports the team to make the right decision.”
This message is echoed globally, as healthcare providers across the world are using data to help make life-saving decisions. St. Luke‘s University Health Network in the U.S. launched several new applications, including Teams, Power BI and Dynamics 365 that focus on connecting the clinician to the patient. This has involved collecting data from patients of COVID-19 to determine what the patient volumes are, and how quickly they are increasing, so management can pull the right resources together across the network to manage patient spikes. This solution gives clinicians the necessary patient data at their fingertips to help them make more informed decisions with patients and their families.
“Technology supports clinicians to improve, innovate and accelerate evidence-based medicine,” says Charles Sonday, acute care nurse practitioner and network medical director of provider informatics, St. Luke‘s University Health Network. “This is about breaking down barriers to knowledge, data and resources, while always keeping the patient at the center of health care innovation.”