Next, we have the finalists for best initiative for patients.
Verseone
Overview. Verseone was approached by the Royal Surrey County Hospital (RSCH) Maternity Department because they wanted to improve their maternity offering through a portal with multiple uses – a patient user hub, staff hub and the ability to commercialise their popular maternity courses.
Why? RSCH wanted a tool that would aid pregnant people through their antenatal journey, providing them with resources and courses in one place.
What happened? A portal was created that could be accessed directly on the trust’s website, where patients could sign up for a portal login. The portal provides patients with information about their pregnancy journey week-by-week and gives them the opportunity to take part in group discussions and build a community with other expectant parents if they wish. The team then sought to increase bookings and enhance the commercial offering of their maternity classes in a secure and accessible manner. The portal is designed to assist the trust with this, clearly defining course descriptions and prices, generating emails and sending relevant information to the booker. The process is underpinned by a secure integrated payment portal, allowing a smooth journey from selecting a course to securing a place.
Looking ahead. Through this project the trust aims to provide ongoing support to expectant parents whilst also improving experiences for the staff guiding the parents and delivering their baby.
vCreate Neuro
Overview. vCreate Neuro is a secure video service developed with leading clinicians to connect patients, families, and healthcare professionals to improve cross-centre communication, remote diagnostics and clinical decision making.
Why? Approximately 80 percent of the population regularly use smart phones in their daily lives; vCreate Neuro utilises the universal presence of smartphones to empower patients and families to securely connect with healthcare specialists and to supply professionals with secure access to patient data. Patients and families can remotely upload videos of potential seizures, movement tests and other symptoms to the secure, cloud-based service wherein they can share metadata with clinicians who can then remotely make a diagnosis, give advice and much more.
What happened? The clinician-to-clinician feature is helping to improve connections between different healthcare factions both in hospitals and the wider community, creating a more streamlined and collaborative service. This was recently utilised by Edinburgh’s Neonatal Physiotherapy team who received a video via vCreate from a family worried about their baby’s movements. Concerned by the footage, the team used vCreate Neuro to send the data to Dr Jay Shetty, Consultant Paediatric Neurologist for urgent review. Within a week, the baby was brought in for an EEG and diagnosed with infantile spasms and epilepsy. Thanks to the cross-communication between teams, the condition was caught early which helped prevent further damage to the baby’s brain development.
Looking ahead. vCreate Neuro continues to expand its range; being used by Texas’ Dell Children’s Medical Centre’s Paediatric Neurology team in St Lucia. The service is being adapted with external organisations to make it accessible to everyone on a global scale.
Solve.Care
Overview. Solve.Care provides a Web3 based healthcare management platform (Care.Platform) that uses blockchain to redefine how healthcare is accessed, administered, and paid for – enabling the creation of digital health networks used to improve health outcomes through effective care coordination.
Why? Unlike traditional forms of cyber security, Care.Protocol provides a governance later for the underlying fabric of the platform; handling communication and synchronisation between participants, wallets, cards, coins, and external systems. They do not store data collectively in a traditional database or data warehouse, instead user data is placed in the control of the user using assigned Care.Nodes.
What happened? Every major enterprise platform consumes event streams to make various backend modules to communicate. Solve.Care has made sure that event streams on the platform are tokenised (hashed) and is end-to-end encrypted. All event stream payloads are encrypted using ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography), a highly secure key-based encryption. These end-to-end cryptographic sessions are originated at the Care.Wallet user.
Looking ahead Solve.Care continues to provide decentralised and effective security across a variety of health care providers; ensuring patient data is secure and effectively managed.
Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust
Overview. #CallMe is a patient-centred initiative aming to ensure that patients are addressed by their preferred name of term of address. It involves creating a culture and digital record of the preference which is easily accessible for healthcare workers.
Why? The trust says that 30 percent of patients have indicated that they prefer to be called something other than their first formal surname, which helps to foster a respectful and kind relationship between patients and healthcare workers.
What happened? #CallMe firstly requires recognition of the issue and the development of a culture to ensure that patients are addressed by their preferred name every time, in every healthcare setting. The trust created an ability to digitally record this information with a focus on ensuring that it is easily accessible, by giving digital prominence on electronic patient records and by ensuring that a #CallMe field is included on both patient stickers and name bands. #CallMe is included in a different font and in italics to distinguish it from other identifying information; it minimises the number of characters used and is compliant with labelling requirements. Since its launch, over 130,000 patients have completed their #CallMe field and staff feedback indicates that it helps in creating a connection with patients.
Looking ahead. The trust highlights its ongoing passion for establishing a respectful and positive relationship with patients and notes that informatics has been able to show breakdown of results by patient age group, gender and ethnicity. Trust area compliance is recorded live, allowing for focused work to learn areas that have performed well and support those that have struggled.
Yorkshire Health Partners Ltd
Overview. Yorkshire Health Partners (YHP) mobilised a Children and Young People (CYP) social prescribing service across the East Riding, working in partnership with primary care, local authority, voluntary sector partners and Street Games to support and empower YP to achieve their goals.
Why? YHP seeks to link CYP to the community to improve their social, mental and physical wellbeing, combat social isolation, and help CYP to achieve their full potential.
What happened? The team of social prescribers work with CYP via a blend of telephone, face-to-face, virtual and online methods, open to any YP aged 11-18 (or up to 25 within the scope of the SEND agenda). The service is delivered through a person-centred approach, developing a personalised plan for the YP according to what matters to them. The social prescribers connect the CYP to community groups and statutory services for support and work with them to improve areas such as self-confidence and anxiety by showing them tools that they can continue throughout their life, building resilience for the future. Key performance indicators are managed by YHP’s performance dashboard with monthly reports created, and outcomes are agreed with the CYP.
Looking ahead. YHP are keen to work in collaboration with other areas to expand social prescribing for children and young people, with further funding secured to work with children in Hull to address social isolation and health inequalities; to work with young people in York to offer social prescribing; and to look at how personal health budgets can be used to support social prescribing for young people meeting SEND criteria.
