University Healthcare
Adapting technology to meet an urgent need during the pandemic
Pathpoint ICU has been a user-led expansion of an existing Open Medical Pathpoint platform to triage, track and review urgent referrals to critical care by clinicians across the hospital. This development was initiated due to the COVID-19 pandemic and designed by the clinical teams and the digital services department at London North West University Healthcare Trust (LNWUHT) who had successfully used the Pathpoint eTrauma platform for several years. They adapted this trusted platform to enable clinical teams to refer patients who were candidates for critical care during the COVID-19 crisis.
Challenges
The COVID-19 pandemic placed an extraordinary burden on the critical care unit at LNWUHT.
There was a need for a robust solution to enable clinical teams to effectively manage the high volume of patients coming into the unit during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also it was critical to address the risks with staff safety and wellbeing.
Solution
Clinicians can allocate “tags” to patients to help filter and categorise according to clinical state or required input, for example “Prone” or “Renal Replacement Therapy (RRT)”.
The tags can then be used to create bespoke patient lists for the purposes of clinical prioritisation or suitability for transfer.
They have been able to report in real-time the accurate number of patients against COVID status, location, ventilation status, prone/supine positioning and RRT, amongst other parameters, all of which are proving invaluable not only for the clinical team, but also to the Gold Command.
Reports are generated from Pathpoint ICU that contain high-level clinical information gathered through the clinical tags into aggregate, non-patient identifiable reports of key metrics.
Pathpoint ICU supports existing EPR platforms by capturing clinical decisions and producing documents to support clinical teams.
This integration with existing platforms ensures data accuracy for the reporting cycles and clinical governance, with the decision-making processes being visible and transparent to the clinical teams.
The Pathpoint ICU platform is an agile and flexible way of referring patients to critical care teams, and subsequently tracking both their location and clinical outcomes at each stage of their patient journey. It draws patient level data from existing patient administration systems, ensuring that clinical teams see the most relevant patient data, triggers onward referrals from A&E/wards/other remote clinical sites to critical care, and supports clinical decisions by the appropriate critical care doctors.
The clinical teams at LNWUHT have been pivotal to this new design, and Open Medical have been proud to work alongside the clinicians in critical care and the Digital Services department to develop this agile and flexible solution.