Project provides NHS nurses with direct access to medical device information

Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Trust has gone live with an interoperability project which provides nurses from the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) with direct access to information generated by medical devices.

Powered by Enovacom, this new process aims to improve the efficiency and safety of care through the recording of patient data in real-time and subsequent integration within the hospital electronic medical record (EMR).

The solution can integrate any data generated by medical devices to any hospital information system, from patient vitals to alarms. The connection of medical devices to health IT systems enables automated data collection, with the aim of allowing nurses to spend more time on patient care rather than manually writing vital signs information in the EMRs. In order to start implementing this Medical Device Interoperability strategy, the Trust decided to begin with the connection of their ventilators to their EMR.

The Trust’s ICU manager, Christine Jones said: “Before the Enovacom software was in place, members of our ICU team were double-documenting and manually transcribing patient data, meaning there was an increased risk of transcription errors. The knock-on effect for this process was that it reduced the amount time we could spend with patients.”

The Trust required a solution to allow the exchange of information as well as allowing clinicians to use their preferred medical devices. Enovacom worked with the clinical staff to scope clinical requirements of patient clinical parameters, timing of results, frequency of data, and display of data in the software application. The project was completed in six months.

Paul Charnley, director of IT and information of Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Trust, said: “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. This project was an important part of our journey towards digitising patient records through care pathways and paperless working. 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.”

Laurent Frigara, co-founder at Enovacom added: “Saving clinical time and enhancing patient care remains core to the digitisation of the NHS. Interoperability is so important in ensuring nurses have the right information on the right patient at the right time to improve clinical outcomes. What Wirral has demonstrated is that clinicians need digital tools to have the right information and be as productive as possible.“