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Showing results for tags 'Technology'.
Found 379 results
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News Article
County Durham and Darlington improves patient safety with AI
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust has created and implemented an artificial intelligence (AI) model to protect patients from acute kidney injury (AKI). The trust’s AI-driven model helps healthcare staff to identify patients who are at risk from AKI and to swiftly respond with treatment. The technology uses risk stratification digital tools that staff are able to access through an app. These are combined with care processes developed at the trust and which involve a new specialist nurse team, preventive specialist intervention, assessment and follow-up. Its implementation at County Durham and Darlington has led to a reduction in both hospital-acquired and community AKI. Overall, the incidence of AKI within the trust fell from 6.5% between March and May 2020, to 3.8% during the same period in 2021. The most significant reduction was seen in hospital-acquired AKI – which fell by more than 80%. Jeremy Cundall, medical director for County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust and executive lead for the project, said: “The partnership has resulted in patients being detected earlier – preventing AKI from occurring or mitigating the worsening of existing AKI. Accordingly, patients have been more effectively triaged to the right pathways of care including referral and transfer to tertiary renal units where appropriate.” Claire Stocks, early detection, resuscitation and mortality lead nurse for County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, said: “This work has been a project very much about using collaborative partnerships to enhance patient safety and quality. An idea that was developed in a ‘cupboard conversation’ is now a fully operational specialist nurse service. Utilising digital innovations supports rapid triage, early detection and treatment to improve outcomes.” In addition to the improvements in patient safety, the technology has delivered cost savings for the trust too. County Durham and Darlington saved more than £2million in direct costs from reductions in AKI incidence. The improved transfer of patients has also released ICU capacity, vital at a time when the NHS is dealing with a growing national backlog for elective surgery. Read full story Source: Digital Health, 27 July 2022 -
News Article
Barclay calls urgent ‘hackathons’ over ambulance crisis
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The new health and social care secretary has asked officials to hastily organise several “hackathons” to try to address the crisis in ambulance performance. The first, which was instigated just last week, will take place tomorrow (28 July), and a second is planned for August, sources told HSJ. Messages from officials described the work as a “request from our new secretary of state” and explained the short notice by saying he was “pushing… quite strongly for something before the end of the month”. The aim is said to be to examine what is driving poor performance, and the Department of Health and Social Care is “particularly interested in understanding which factors reduce risk to patients”, according to one message seen by HSJ. Hackathons are short, time-limited collaborative design events, typically involving computer programmers and data scientists or analysts, which aim to result in working software or product on the chosen theme by the end. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 27 July 2022 -
News Article
Hospital in meltdown over IT issues
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A whistleblower has warned a London hospital is "literally in meltdown" after its IT system was knocked out during last week's heatwave. Operations at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth were cancelled after its IT servers broke down in 40C (104F) temperatures on 19 July. A doctor told the BBC "poor planning" and "chronic underfunding" meant issues remained a week later. A spokesperson for the hospital said IT issues were "having an ongoing impact". Without a functioning IT system, staff have returned to paper notes, the doctor said. The anonymous whistleblower, who works as a doctor at Guy's and St Thomas', said this meant "we see very worrying results, but we don't know where the patients are so we spend ages tracking them down". "We cannot read any historical notes from patients. Names are being misspelt, so scans are not showing up. "Each morning, someone hand-delivers a stack of test results to the ward. In there, we received several patient results that don't belong to our ward," the doctor said. "If we don't recover our shared drives, we risk losing months of research data, if not years." Read full story Source: BBC News, 27 July 2022 -
News Article
London NHS trust cancels operations as IT system fails in heatwave
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
One of the NHS’s biggest hospital trusts is facing major problems after its IT system failed because of the extreme temperatures earlier this week. Guy’s and St Thomas’ trust (GSTT) in London has had to cancel operations, postpone appointments and divert seriously ill patients to other hospitals in the capital as a result of its IT meltdown. The situation means that doctors cannot see patients’ medical notes remotely and are having to write down the results of all examinations by hand. They are also unable to remotely access the results of diagnostic tests such as X-rays and CT and MRI scans and are instead having to call the imaging department, which is overloading the department’s telephone lines. GSTT has declared the problem a “critical site incident”. It has apologised to patients and asked them to bring letters or other paperwork about their condition with them to their appointment to help overcome doctors’ loss of access to their medical history. One doctor at GSTT, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “This is having a major effect. We are back to using paper and can’t see any existing electronic notes. We are needing to triage basic tests like blood tests and scans. There’s no access to results apart from over the phone, and of course the whole hospital is trying to use that line. “Frankly, it’s a big patient safety issue and we haven’t been told how long it will take to fix. We are on divert for major specialist services such as cardiac, vascular and ECMO.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 21 July 2022 -
News ArticleA new patient medical records system at a Spokane Veterans Affairs hospital in the US has caused nearly 150 cases of patient harm, according to a federal watchdog agency. An inspection by the VA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that a new Cerner electronic health record (EHR) system, now owned by Oracle, failed to deliver more than 11,000 orders for specialty care, lab work and other services at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center, the first VA facility to roll out the new technology. The OIG review found that the new EHR sent thousands of orders for medical care to an undetectable location, or unknown queue, instead of the intended care or service location, effectively causing the orders to disappear without letting clinicians know they weren't delivered. The intent of the unknown queue is to capture orders entered by providers that the new EHR cannot deliver to the intended location because the orders were not recognized as a “match” by the system, according to the VA watchdog. From facility go-live in October 2020 through June 2021, the new EHR failed to deliver more than 11,000 orders for requested clinical services. Those lost orders, often called referrals, resulted in delayed care and what a VA patient safety team classified as dozens of cases of "moderate harm" and one case of "major harm." The clinical reviewers conducted 1,286 facility event assessments and identified and classified 149 adverse events for patients. Read full story Source: Fierce Healthcare, 20 July 2022
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Content ArticleThis report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change looks at how the NHS needs to adapt to meet the demands of the current population. It asks the questions, should we and could we go much further in fundamentally changing the design of how the NHS is run, highlighting two key societal changes that make change necessary: increases in our knowledge of how to stay healthy, and huge technological advances such as artificial intelligence.
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News ArticlePatients are at risk of a missed cancer diagnosis due to a reliance on paper records, an NHS trust has admitted after a man died due to his tumour being overlooked. Michael Lane, 50, from Shrewsbury, was “failed” by Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust, his family has said after his cancer scan result was misplaced leaving him with a growing kidney tumour for 10 years. The trust is yet to fully launch an electronic record system a year after an investigation into Mr Lane’s death warned other patients were at risk due to the gap in paper records. Mr Lane went into Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital for a scan following a referral for suspected cancer in 2011. The radiographer flagged a small tumour but the scan was overlooked, placed within his paper records and never reported as being a concern. In an investigation report carried out by the trust in May 2021, seen by The Independent, the hospital admitted that had his tumour been seen and operated on earlier he may have survived. The report also admitted there were ongoing risks within the trust due to gaps in its electronic records system. It said: “The implementation of an IT solution will not prevent sad cases such as that of Mr Lane where the scan report that was missed took place before the widespread availability of such systems, however, it is clear that until we have an electronic requesting and sign-off system we remain at risk of new cases of missed results and harm occurring as a result of the ongoing reliance of paper-based results.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 17 July 2022
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Content ArticleAn increasing number of healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) applications are in development or already in use, but the safety impact of using AI in healthcare is largely unknown. This qualitative study in the journal Safety Science aimed to explore how different stakeholders (patients, hospital staff, technology developers and regulators) think about safety and the safety assurance of healthcare AI. Through a series of interviews, the authors assessed stakeholder perceptions of an AI-based infusion pump in the intensive care unit. Participants expressed perceptions about: the potential impact of healthcare AI requirements for human-AI interaction safety assurance practices and regulatory frameworks for AI and the gaps that exist how incidents involving AI should be managed. The authors concluded that there is currently a technology-centric focus on AI safety, and a wider systems approach is needed. They also identified a need for greater awareness of existing standards and best practice among technology developers.
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Content ArticleThis guide developed by the AHSN Network, the University of Plymouth and the pharma company Boehringer Ingelheim sets out four key principles to involve and engage patients and the public in digital health innovation: Engage – map out your strategy and motivations, identify a representative cohort and develop inclusive engagement practices. Acknowledge, value & support – show you value patients’ and the public’s contribution to ongoing and transparent communication, any necessary training and potential financial reimbursement. Communicate – tailored external communication and open feedback channels are crucial to maintaining engagement and accountability by all parties. Trust and transparency – In order to gain patients’ trust, organisations conducting PPIE should be trustworthy and transparent about potential risks.
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Content Article
This is part of our series of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews, where we talk to people working for patient safety about their role and what motivates them. Clive talks to us about the important role of digital technologies in tackling the big issues healthcare faces, the need for digital tools and records to be joined-up and interoperable, and how his experiences as a carer have shaped how he sees patient safety. -
Content ArticleThe COVID-19 pandemic has made it more difficult to maintain high quality in medical education. As online formats are often considered unsuitable, interactive workshops and seminars have particularly often been postponed or cancelled. To meet the challenge, Angelina Müller and her colleagues converted an existing interactive undergraduate elective on safety culture into an online event. In this article, they describe the conceptualisation and evaluation of the elective.
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Content Article
Tracey Cammish, Patient safety, Clinical Intelligence and Partnership Lead, explains why patient safety is central to everything NHS Supply Chain does, and why clinical and end-user experience is so important. -
Content ArticleThis paper in the journal Learning Health Systems examines what would be needed to develop learning health systems (LHS) in the United Kingdom, considering national policy implications and actions which local organisations and health systems could take. It identifies opportunities for local NHS organisations to make better use of health data and ways that national policy could promote greater use of collaboration and analytics.
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Content ArticleThe What Good Looks Like (WGLL) Hub has been developed to support NHS staff and their organisations in achieving What Good Looks Like. It brings together a wealth of digital health information and features good practice examples of technology-enabled healthcare, standards, guides and policies, useful tools and templates and networking information. It will help you with your digital transformation work.
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News Article
Government plans new ‘regulatory levers’ to force pace of NHS’s digital uptake
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Digital improvement will be added to the conditions which trusts and integrated care systems have to legally meet as part of their operating licence, the government has indicated. The move is part of a raft of actions unveiled by the Department of Health and Social Care which are intended to “modernise” the NHS. The Plan for Digital Health and Social Care states: “At present, there are limited formal mechanisms for overseeing delivery of NHS digital priorities. Digital does not yet feature in the provider licence, system oversight framework, or Care Quality Commission assessments.” It adds: “We are exploring options for filling this gap in discussions between NHS England and the CQC, and through a review and consultation with system leaders and frontline staff.” New “regulatory levers” will be used to: “signal that digitisation is a priority, identify the non-negotiable standards of digital capability, [and] explain how we will monitor and support compliance”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 30 June 2022 -
Content ArticleThe 2022 conference returned to Parliament on Thursday 19 May and was hosted by Taiwo Owatemi MP. Entitled “The Road to Resilience”, it explored the steps that will need to be taken in the years to come to continue the momentum seen during the pandemic around the key role of HealthTech and make the healthcare system more resilient for its staff and patients. Featuring keynote speakers Sam Roberts, CEO at NICE & Lord Kamall, Minister for Technology, Innovation and Life Sciences, the conference brought together key health sector stakeholders, providing insights into the direction of UK health care, its recovery following the pandemic & how technology can play a vital role in enhancing the health system moving forward. View the recording of the conference below.
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Content ArticleThe health and social care system’s long-term sustainability depends on effective digital transformation. This document outlines the government's plans to reform and develop the use of digital technologies in health and social care in order to deliver a system that will be faster, more effective and more personalised. The plan pulls together the four goals of reform for the health and care system identified by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care: prevent people’s health and social care needs from escalating personalise health and social care and reduce health disparities improve the experience and impact of people providing services transform performance
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Content ArticleFollowing the UK's exit from the European Union, the government aims to improve how medical devices and diagnostic devices are regulated through a new framework. The MHRA held a consultation on the future regulation of medical devices in the UK in autumn 2021 and this report outlines the government's response to the consultation. The consultation received 891 responses and aimed to collect views on developing a future legislation for medical devices which delivers: improved patient and public safety greater transparency of regulatory decision making and medical device information close alignment with international best practice, and more flexible, responsive and proportionate regulation of medical devices.
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Content ArticleThis study in BMC Health Services Research aimed to evaluate the impact of an Internet of Things intervention in a hospital unit. The Internet of Things refers to a network of physical objects that are connected by sensors, software and other technologies in order to transfer data and interact with one another. This study demonstrates the effects of smart technologies on patient falls, hand hygiene compliance rate and staff experiences. The authors reported some positive changes that were also reflected in interviews with staff. They identified behavioural and environmental issues as being particularly important to ensure the success of Internet of Things innovations in a hospital setting.
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Content ArticleIn this video, Michal Seres, who lives with Crohn's disease, talks about his experience of living with an ostomy bag and how he came to develop his own tools to help manage his treatment. Michael established 11 Health, a company which aims to create a collaborative community of patients, healthcare professionals and researchers to develop digital health solutions for patients with chronic illness. Michael talks about the importance of including patients in developing devices and treatments, and how positive, supportive relationships foster collaboration.
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Content ArticleThis book is a resource for the coaches who provide health IT-related assistance for primary care practices to support their QI and practice transformation efforts. The audience for this handbook includes both the health IT-focused coaches who support QI work as well as the practice facilitators/coaches who have the necessary background, interest, and skills to provide clinical health IT support. Although the handbook is primarily intended for external coaches working with primary care practices, the content could also be useful for practice-based staff responsible for addressing health IT needs related to QI. The handbook assumes readers already have a basic level of comfort with EHR use and with extracting and using electronic data for QI.
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Content ArticleThis strategy sets out the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care’s vision for how data will be used to improve the health and care of the population in a safe, trusted and transparent way. It: provides an overarching narrative and action plan to address the current cultural, behavioural and structural barriers in the system, with the ultimate goal of having a health and care system that is underpinned by high-quality and readily available data marks the next steps of the discussion about how we can best utilise data for the benefit of patients, service users, and the health and care system This strategy applies to England only. The strategy shows how data will be used to bring benefits to all parts of health and social care – from patients and care users to staff on the frontline and pioneers driving the most cutting-edge research. It is backed by a series of concrete commitments, including: investing in secure data environments to power life-saving research and treatments using technology to allow staff to spend more quality time with patients giving people better access to their own data through shared care records and the NHS App.
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Content Article
Type 1 diabetes is a life-long condition that causes the level of glucose in a person’s blood to be too high. It is caused by the body’s immune system attacking the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, the hormone that allows the body to use glucose as energy. It cannot be cured, and people with diabetes need to inject or infuse insulin multiple times a day to control their blood sugar levels. Peer support communities can help people with type 1 diabetes to manage their condition safely and feel less isolated. In this blog, Paul Sandells, a diabetes peer supporter and advocate, talks about the important role of peer support in helping people with type 1 diabetes improve their blood glucose control and deal with the burden that diabetes can place on daily life. -
Content Article
This is part of our series of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews, where we talk to people working for patient safety about their role and what motivates them. Mark talks to us about how he came to work in healthcare, the vital role of safety scientists and human factors specialists in improving patient safety, and the challenges involved in integrating new technologies into the health system. -
Content ArticleHandover in healthcare settings can be a time when the risk of error and harm is increased. This blog summarises the results of global survey that asked the opinions of healthcare workers on the safety of handover. It highlights ten key points raised by the results: Handover causes frequent errors and patient safety incidents Handover errors can cause serious harm to patients Most people think they are better than average at handover The longer you’ve been around, the scarier handover appears Different types of handovers have a similar safety profile The safety of handover is a problem all over the world Most practitioners use manual or informal systems to support handover EPR systems are not up to the job of supporting handover Staff need more training, and we need more time Healthcare leaders want better electronic systems The results of the survey have been published in Preprints.
