Intensive Care Unit at Wirral gain access to medical devices information

Nurses from the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Trust now have direct access to information generated by medical devices. 

Powered by Enovacom, this new process involves patient data, which is recorded in real-time, being directly integrated within the hospital electronic medical record (EMR) via the software company’s Patient Connect platform.

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, guaranteeing data quality, and allowing nurses to spend more time on patient care rather than manually writing vital signs information in the EMRs.

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 project began with the connection of the trust’s ventilators to their EMR and was completed in six months.

Laurent Frigara, co-founder at Enovacom said: “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.“

As a Global Digital Exemplar and named by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) as one of the world’s ‘most wired’ hospitals, the trust plans to help other NHS providers develop their digital capabilities around mobile devices integration by publishing a blueprint in the future.

Paul Charnley, director of IT and information at Wirral, 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.”