Overview of the challenge
The Children’s Acute Transport Service (The CATS team) are a retrieval team within the NHS, based at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in Central London. The team work year-round to provide transport services to sick children who are referred to or from critical care services around the country – at Great Ormond Street and beyond. As such, they play a critical role in ensuring children are able to reach the care they need in a timely manner, while being given the best possible clinical care on the move.
The CATS team approached Kinseed to solve two problems they were facing: management of the huge amount of administrative data involved in each and every transport was becoming increasingly difficult, and providing remote support for clinical teams while they were travelling in ambulances was only possible over traditional channels like a phone call.
Since engaging with the CATS team, Kinseed has rolled out SwiftCare and revolutionised the way data is gathered, used and managed throughout the patient journey.
MediLog for referral management
As a first step to solve the challenges the CATS team were facing, Kinseed deployed MediLog, a key part of the SwiftCare suite. Deployed on a secure cloud environment, Kinseed worked with the CATS team to develop a specifc form and workflow engine, designed to replace an ageing manual process mostly managed through excel and paper-based forms. During this deployment, Kinseed identified a number of cases where previously manual steps could be easily automated, including the gathering and collation of GP / demographic data for patients based on other known information, and implemented a simple online data management environment – designed to save the team precious time and effort when logging the details of a critically sick child.
MediVue and MediConnect for remote patient monitoring
Alongside the above implementation of MediLog, Kinseed worked with the CATS team to address a problem faced across all transport teams: when a patient is being transported in an ambulance, the only clinical staff able to truly see the status of the patient are those on-board with them. The CATS team wanted to find a way to allow experts and consultants to become significantly more involved in the care and monitoring of children being transported, to help improve patient safety and identify needed interventions before the child even reaches the destination hospital or unit.
Kinseed’s MediConnect device was rolled out to mobile-enable the team’s existing fleet of mobile patient monitors. These monitors sit in the ambulance alongside each child in transport, and while they monitor all the key vital signs of the child, the MediConnect device collects this data, encrypts and compresses it, and transmits it securely over 4G, 3G and known Wi-Fi networks to a secure cloud-based environment.
At the other end of the process, Kinseed installed MediVue – a browser-based remote monitoring application, which collects the data gathered by MediConnect, and displays it in a simple, easy to read dashboard and drilldown view. This setup provided clinicians “back at base” to see real-time waveforms and metrics of patients in transport, allowing experts and consultants to provide their valuable clinical expertise to all patients in transport – not just those who happen to be on the same ambulance as the clinician.
Impact and results
Since implementing the above technologies, the CATS team have conducted over 3,000 remotely monitored journey, each of which has seen significantly improved patient safety and oversight. Alongside this, the length of time for the average handover at the end of a transport has decreased significantly – with estimates of an average saving of between 30 and 90 minutes per referral. This significant time saving has resulted in the team saving a huge amount of manpower; enabling an extremely critical team within the NHS to do more with less, and provide their service to more critically sick children than before.
Watch the video
Watch our short video now to see what the CATS team have to say, and understand more about the impact Kinseed’s SwiftCare suite has had on the patient journey: