by Eoin O'Carroll | May 6, 2014 | News
Hospitals and staff operate in a controlled environment where guidelines and protocols are in place. These guidelines and protocols are essential to every hospital as they provide frameworks for working with multi-discipline teams and allow NHS staff to put a standardisation of care into practice. This has a major effect in patient care as it reduces the variation in treatment and thus reduces the chances of error.
Hospitals guidelines and protocols in the UK are all quite similar. They derive from the National Institute For Clinical Excellence (“Nice”). For every hospital, there are variations depending on treatments or staffing availability. As a result every hospital has a vast array of guidelines and protocols, these can reach into thousands of pages.
There are two common ways that all hospitals can access these documents at the moment.
1. Through hard copy books that are distributed to individual staff members.
2. Through the hospital intranet.
Hard copy books are the more traditional means. They cause headaches for both medical staff and the protocol development team maintaining the documents. The obvious headache for hospital staff is the need to carry documents from ward to ward. For the protocol development team there is an issue of document control. With every new edition released, the protocol development team must make sure the out of date document is returned. This can be a logistical nightmare and in some cases there is a concern that out of date documentation is still in use.
The hospital intranet is a more robust system for alleviating problems of document control. But it has its own problems. One of access, even though some medical staff would have their own dedicated PC or laptop the large majority of staff rely on shared computer access. To make things worse, users need to login to the hospital system every time they access shared computers. Searching for the required information can be an issue as the intranet only makes the documentation available through PDF files.
At present the workload and strain on hospital staff is increasing. In order to utilise their time staff may consider not referencing guidelines and protocols. Instead they may rely on past knowledge which could increase the risk of medical error. There is a concern that changes in drug dosages or acute emergency guidance may be overlooked.
It becomes even more of an issue for trainee medical staff who in a lot of cases are placed on 6 month rotations in hospitals. Guidance for these individuals is important. Especially with the short period of time/ learning curve that they need to get up to speed with new hospital environment. The problem outlined for experienced staff are the same for these trainees. But is magnified with the pressure and time limitations they have at a Trust.
Initiatives like having the NHS paperless by 2018 and the Nursing Technology Fund mean that mobile devices are becoming the norm in hospitals throughout the UK. This has opened up opportunities to change the shape of how hospitals distribute and maintain their guidelines and protocols. Our Enterprise Solution ONCOassist has done just that. The application allows Oncology departments to integrate these documents in an interactive manner..
Our unique interactive format allows users to navigate with ease and speed. There is no need to trawl through PDF’s and paper documents.
Protocol development teams no longer need to worry about document control among staff. Portable Medical Technology use a cloud based system that syncs with mobile devices. It will keep all software and documentation up to date with the latest changes.
ONCOassist’s Enterprise Solution is also Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) friendly. This allows all staff access to critical information. Thus the need to distribute hospital devices to all staff is not needed.
Medical Students no longer need to worry about the vast array of information. The information they need will be in the palm of their hand. The interactive manner allows them to access the most critical information they need. No longer will they have to leave a patient’s bedside to find, to wait, to access, and then go through pdf’s on a computer to find what they need.
ONCOassist provides users with interactive formulas and prognostic tools that are CE approved. Hospitals will be able to notify staff of changes through push notifications and news feeds. Tracking of usage will give hospitals clear indications of adherence.
The benefits are clear. Reduced time, reduced chances of error and increased quality of care.
If you want further details on ONCOassist’s Enterprise Solution please contact us at info@oncoassist.com
by Kevin Bambury | Apr 17, 2014 | News
Healthcare IT has long been dominated by large institutional players; these larger vendors had the capacity to withstand the long sales cycles and large up front development costs. However, they have not had the same incentives to integrate and partner as smaller companies. Much to frustration of healthcare providers, this has resulted in fragmented systems that are not interconnected.
Thankfully, things are about to change, a new slew of digital health start ups supported by health accelerators like Healthbox, Startup Health and Rockhealth have begun to gain market traction. You learn quickly as a start-up that you need to “collaborate or die.” . You can’t do everything, so work with the right people to create meaningful solutions to real problems. This is particularly relevant in the case of electronic health records communicating and interacting with decision support systems like ONCOassist.
Wouldn’t it be great if all of the ONCOassist’s calculations and prognostic algorithms were auto-populated providing instantaneous decision support information? A recent study by the West Institute estimated that software interoperability could save $30 billion annually.
In the long run interoperability seems like it makes sense to everyone; look at the success of the Apple and Android App Stores. This is an example of large company opening its doors to developers and entrepreneurs who create win-win situations. Customers get great niche products that add value to their existing platforms and both the developer and the hardware vendor share in the profits.
We haven’t seen this kind of success yet in digital health. Some of the newer electronic health records are beginning to open their platforms and invite integration. Examples of this include Medopad, Evolve and Dr. Chrono(who recently opened their API). Before the dream of interoperability can be realized there are numerous obstacles that need to be overcome, these include :
Regulatory
Apps vary in the dangers they pose to patients. The FDA and the EU stratify these into classification systems. The more danger your app poses the greater the overhead. This is a new space and regulatory agencies are just starting to get to grip with how to manage healthcare apps. Integration between apps and EHR is a whole other quagmire that needs to be managed. The FDA has recently announced that they will be issuing draft guidance on interoperability in the coming months.
Technical
Unlike the development of apps where you have 3 main players, Android, Windows and Apple, the electronic health record market is massively varied. There are numerous EHR vendors; some are built using old technologies which makes them more difficult to access. This provides a huge challenge for even the most well resourced development teams.
Commercial
Like everything in Healthcare a good business case is required before a customer will sign off on paying for the integration of an app with an existing system. Whereas the efficiency gains may seem obvious to us, they may not to be so obvious to the CFO of a large healthcare institution. Also, agreements must be made between the electronic health record provider and the app developer. Both parties must be incentivised correctly.
Although a hospital where all software systems speak to each other is inevitable, as a developer of a fully compliant medical app we see a number of challenges that must be overcome, collaboration between entrepreneurs, providers and vendors (both big and small) over the coming years is critical in overcoming these obstacles and giving the providers access to the systems they deserve.
Are you a healthcare provider,EHR or entrepreneur? Want to work together? Contact us, we want to hear from you.
by Kevin Bambury | Mar 17, 2014 | News
ONCOassist will integrate Clatterbridge chemo protocols as part of their cross-platform system.
March 17, 2014 – Portable Medical Technology and The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre NHS Foundation Trust have today announced an enterprise agreement which will see ONCOassist, Portable Medical Technology’s revolutionary CE approved software system being deployed as the main oncology decision support system used within Clatterbridge.
ONCOassist was launched in January of last year following extensive development involving oncologists, system developers and compliance personnel in Europe and the United States. Since launch ONCOassist has garnered growing acceptance amongst oncology professionals throughout the UK and Ireland. In August of this year, the platform was offered as an enterprise system. This enables individual trusts and institutions to integrate their guidelines and protocols and make them available throughout the trust in an easy to access and intuitive format across multiple mobile operating systems including iOS, Android and Windows.
The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, based in Wirral, Merseyside, have been working closely with the ONCOassist team over the past twelve months and an enterprise agreement was the logical next step. “After many discussions with Clatterbridge we realised that, as access to the most up to date version of their protocol library was so important, developing a guidelines and protocols engine that allows for the easy integration and updating of trust specific content that can interact with the many CE approved tools already present on the platform would be of huge benefit,” said Eoin O’Carroll of ONCOassist.
Thomas Poulter, Head of IM&T at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, said: “Having ONCOassist available in clinics and on the wards will save our clinicians time. The oncology nurses and clinicians will have access to all of the key oncology decision support information and tools they need. For example, our nurses often need to reference protocols or treatment algorithms when delivering chemotherapy treatment. ONCOassist makes it easy to do this.”
Jo Upton, Skin Cancer Advanced Nurse Practitioner at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, said: “A cancer nurse’s role is continually evolving to meet the needs of our patients. Important decisions relating to the management of treatment side-effects and the patient experience of their treatment are fast becoming central to the cancer nurse’s role, especially in the outpatient setting. It is essential that vital information to aid decision-making in practice is quick and easy to access. I have found that the ONCOassist app provides easy access to formulas and decision-support information in my day-to-day job.”
Kevin Bambury of ONCOassist said: “We are delighted to have The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre as the first NHS trust using our enterprise system. We look forward to working with them over the coming years as we continue to add features and functionality to the system”.
