CareFlow Connect has been awarded a place on the Clinical Communication Tools framework, set up by NHS X to accelerate the adoption of digital communication tools and help meet the government’s 2021 deadline for phasing out the use of pagers.
Care co-ordination
Care co-ordination
CareFlow Connect is a secure and mobile clinical communications and collaboration system designed to facilitate faster and safer care co-ordination for clinical teams within a hospital and across a care community. It provides encrypted mobile and web-based messaging within and between teams and directly between individuals.
Connect optimises key clinical workflows through a range of features which are configurable depending on an organisation’s needs. It fully integrates with electronic patient records, shared care and social care systems, providing a full view of the communication history and a robust audit trail. It changes the way clinicians, care workers and teams work, freeing up time to care, increasing job satisfaction and improving patient outcomes.
Key features at a glance
• Integrates with EPR, shared care and social care systems.
• Communications done in patient context and assimilated into the patient record.
• Designed to support and optimise clinical workflows.
• Complies with healthcare information and security standards.
• Uses leading edge technologies - cloud hosted, managed, scalable and resilient.
• Replaces pagers, paper lists, phone calls, texts, personal apps and emails.
Recent Covid-19 specific developments:
- Alerting clinical teams of a +ive COVID-19 result using CareFlow Connect
Kettering General is making use of +ive COVID-19 notifications generated by CareFlow Results Reporting, which can be distributed to clinical teams using CareFlow Connect with the use of alerts. This capability means that care co-ordination can be fully mobile, as well as promoting efficient mechanisms for communication during this health crisis.
- Clinicians using pictures to facilitate clinical decision making
Clinicians working in Vascular Surgery at North Bristol are using picture messaging in CareFlow Connect to monitor post-surgical patients. Having an easily accessible record of the wound means the patient is spared unnecessary discomfort from dressing removal. The hospital at home team are utilising the mobile nature of the app and using picture messaging which is allowing swift intervention from senior colleagues. It is hoped that a positive impact will be made upon reducing readmission rates, which is especially significant during the COVID-19 pandemic. A study of benefits will be published later in the year.
Other clinical teams from across our user community use pictures of ICU and Anaesthetic charts and message these in Connect to aid clinical assessment of patients. - Patient status information keeping family members up-to-date
As well as using CareFlow Connect to minimise the risk of infection for clinicians, Aneurin Bevan University Health Board is using information held in CareFlow Connect to inform daily telephone updates to relatives on the condition of inpatients with COVID-19. Critical care nurses who have been unable to work in critical care units during the pandemic have been able to access and use this information to inform their updates with family members, making communication simpler, quicker and safer.
- Facilitating efficient workflow and communications through improved visibility of COVID-19 data & patients
Many of our CareFlow Connect customers are using clinical 'tags' in order to identify cohorts of patients affected by COVID-19 and facilitate clinical workflow. 'Tags' can be locally configured to suit specific needs and applied to a patient's record, allowing clinicians to easily filter team patient lists on a single or combination of 'tags'.
- Safer working for staff in high turnover clinical teams
The Whittington are finding that the Handover function in CareFlow Connect is becoming more valuable for teams with high staff rotation, caused by the COVID-19 situation. Continuity of care is being supported by electronic handovers, which are increasingly being conducted remotely as work pressures increase. Having access to current vital signs and early warning scores within the app is adding valuable clinical insight during these processes.
- Smarter working facilitated by patient messaging - reducing PPE use
Nursing teams at The Whittington are getting advice from Consultants using messaging within CareFlow Connect. Some advice for treating COVID-19 patients is being provided by Consultants via Connect, reducing the need to have face to face conversations and in turn, the need to don and doff PPE.
- Notifying clinical teams of +ive COVID-19 results from 3rd party clinical systems
CareFlow Connect includes the ability, via a published CareFlow Alert APIs, to receive alert notifications for a variety of events and send notifications to CareFlow Connect subscribers. Suitably enabled third party solutions can make use of these APIs in order to generate an alert. For example, a pathology solution or a results reporting system could use the API in order to generate an alert for a +ive COVID-19 result and send a notification to a clinician’s mobile device.
Webinar - Purging the pager' and 'paper out of pockets' during the pandemic
By Kettering General Hospital
Social care
-Adults'
-Children's
-Integration