Alcidion recognised with a Highly Commended at the HTN Now Awards 2022

Alcidion are proud to be awarded a Highly Commended at the HTN Now Awards 2022 in the ‘Making an Impact’ category for the successful implementation of Smartpage at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

This category of the HTN Awards 2022 focuses on health tech programmes of work, projects, services, software and teams that have been making a demonstrable impact on healthcare across the last 12 months. Learn more about how Lancashire Teaching improved their clinical communication with Smartpage below:

Working alongside NHS colleagues in Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Alcidion supported the Acute Medical team in moving from pagers to Smartpage, a digital communication system. This freed up two hours of responding to bleeps in a typical 12-hour shift and users reported significant improvements in efficiency and safety.

Smartpage is an advanced smartphone and web-based system for hospital communication and task management, addressing the requirements of both clinical and non-clinical users. It facilitates rapid, reliable and comprehensive messaging, with two-way closed loop communication, task-management and comprehensive handover.

Alcidion were commissioned to implement and support the transformation from the traditional analogue pager, to a digital strategy. With the implementation of Smartpage, nurses can quickly enter details of their task, along with all patient information that a doctor would require. They can see that the message has been sent to the doctor, when the doctor has seen their message, and receive responses back. Remote opinions can also be sought, with images of rashes, ECG shared securely.

Clinical teams were engaged during implementation by strong clinical leaders within Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and ensured that the leadership of the transformation took into account the complex human factors that exist around a frenetic environment such as the acute medical on-call.

Prior to implementation, time and motions studies were undertaken to measure the time spent directly responding to bleeps. A typical 12-hour shift was associated with two hours of time spent answering and responding to bleeps. The make up of these bleeps was highly varied, but significantly 15 per cent of bleeps were missed, and 20 per cent of bleeps documented were for the wrong person.

Implementation took place within 24 hours within the acute medical team, on one hospital site. The administrative burden of responding to bleeps was eradicated, and replaced with an intuitive digital task list that was held on mobile devices. A typical on call shift has three Foundation Doctors, and one Senior Clinician over a 12 hour period, equating to 16 hours of clinical time saved every 24 hours.

Beyond this significant time saving captured, clearer notes were reported with reduced transcription errors. Clinicians were able to prioritise their tasks based on the digital work list, and this also formed the cornerstone of handover through different shifts. Additionally, colleagues were able to select tasks held by others within their team to ensure that people were prioritised on need and not just whom happened to be working the fastest. The programme is now going to be rolled out across all medical, surgical and paediatric wards within the trust with key savings to clinician time, clinical care and safety all expected.