As part of its policy of placing clinicians at the heart of its digital strategy, Wirral Teaching University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust – one of the biggest and busiest acute NHS trusts in the North West of England – had empowered its anaesthetists to choose ventilators that best met their clinical needs.
The only drawback of the Maquet ventilators that were chosen, however, was that the devices’ drivers would not allow connectivity and subsequent collection and transfer of real-time patient data to the electronic patient record (EPR).
Supporting clinicians’ choices without sacrificing connectivity
As a result, nurses were spending too much time double-documenting and transcribing clinical data between systems. They had to revert to manually based methods of calculating patient’s vital signs, which increased the risk of errors.
The trust needed a flexible and reliable interoperability solution that would not only allow exchange of critical information, but would also support the clinician’s preferred choice of ventilator.
Ideally, the solution would be able to integrate data generated by any medical devices to any hospital information system. And it would need to connect with additional devices to be used in the future, both within the organisation and across the regional Integrated Care System (ICS).
Combining flexibility and usability with automated data collection
Wirral is a Global Digital Exemplar for the NHS, and has been named by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) as one of the world’s ‘most wired’ hospitals. The trust knew it required a proven technical solution that would satisfy clinical and technical staff.
Enovacom’s biomedical interoperability platform Patient Connect proved to be the perfect solution for the trust.
“Enovacom was the obvious choice,” says Paul Charnley, Director of IT and Information, Wirral University Teaching Hospital. “[ENOVACOM Patient Connect] was the only solution we could find that was flexible enough to allow us to get all the granular data we needed out of the ventilators and in the right format to go into the EPR.”
ENOVACOM Patient Connect integrates data from medical devices such as ventilators and vital signs monitors to any hospital information system. This enables automated data collection, guaranteeing data quality, and allowing nurses to spend more time on patient care rather than manually writing vital signs information into the patient record.
Enovacom worked with care teams to scope out the clinical requirements of software application, which involved setting out clinical parameters, timing of results, and frequency of data collection. They then began roll-out of the software across the new ventilators, and provided user training for frontline clinical staff.
Improving access to data for nurses
The solution quickly achieved benefits for the trust, which is one of the largest employers in the Wirral region. Nursing staff can access data through an easy-to-use interface. They can also monitor data from mobile devices, to support more efficient and adaptable workflow. Enovacom has provided additional functionality too, so that clinical staff have ‘on-demand’ access to vital signs information within the EPR.
“The Enovacom team were the enabler for us to not lose the kit that our clinicians wanted to use and also to allow the end user to get the data they needed from our EPR,” says Jacqui Cooper, the trust’s then Chief Nursing Information Officer.
Charnley concludes: “We have deployed a strategic integration tool that supports our ICU nurses first and foremost, but which can also be scaled to other areas of the trust to release more interoperability benefits in the future.”
For further details, download the full case study here. For more on Enovacom, go to www.enovacom.com
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