8th October 2021
The System C & Graphnet Care Alliance and St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (STHK) are delighted to have been highly commended in the Excellence in EPMA and Care Coordination category at the 2021 HTN Health Tech Awards.
The commendation recognises System C’s work with STHK to implement care collaboration tool, CareFlow Connect. The digital tool replaced STHK’s paper-based referrals and handovers with digital workflows to maximise efficiencies and standardise formats for safer care.
CareFlow Connect optimises key clinical workflows through a range of features such as shared patient lists, electronic handover, clinical tagging, task management and referrals. It improves access of patient information by providing clinicians with a fuller, secure, and up-to-date view of patient information on their mobile phones.
STHK is using Connect’s electronic handover functionality, for safer transfer of care between teams to improve outcomes. The system both streamlines the process and standardises the format, complete with notes that are dynamically updated by multi-professional teams and date/time stamped to create a robust audit trail. When patients move between departments, the handover information moves with them. The system also monitors and analyses a patient’s vital signs to identify deteriorating conditions and provides risk scores to trigger further necessary care.
The system has been rolled out across the majority of medical, surgical, obstetrics, gynaecology, paediatrics, community and therapy wards. It is embedded in the clinical workflows across each of these areas and is also used by around 1,600 clinical staff. Many of the wards were onboarded during the pandemic to support the trust’s response and to capitalise on the alerting functionality for observations and COVID-19 positive results.
As an intuitive secure mobile phone app, clinical staff can access and begin using it with minimal training and disruption, as well as through their own devices. So far, the care of around 19,000 patients has been managed using Connect, with 252,000 handovers updated, of which 40,000 were carried out just in the last month, along with 15,000 referrals and 42,000 clinical tags. Early analysis estimates that areas of STHK’s digitisation programme has resulted in a saving of around 2.7 million sheets of paper a year, equating to £38,000 pa of savings.
Ragit Varia, clinical director and a consultant in acute medicine at STHK, said:
Not only has CareFlow standardised and streamlined patient referrals, but it has enabled enhanced accessibility via clinician’s devices. This means the shift lead can have a helicopter view of all acute admissions, and resources can be maximised using the task management facility.
The HTN Awards, which were held on 7 October, help to share, and celebrate digital teams, programmes, innovations. and suppliers that have made a difference to care and services.
