As part of the NHS Long-term Plan, secondary care providers in England will be expected to be fully digitised, including clinical and operational processes across all settings and departments, by 2024. We explore the trends that will help this vision become reality.
As the drive for more integrated care across the health and social care sector continues, healthcare professionals require data and digital records that can be shared across professional networks to inform the patient care decisions. But digitisation is not without its challenges. Medical technology already produces a large amount of data and a recent forecast suggests that, by 2025, healthcare will be responsible for generating more data than any other sector across the globe.
Fuelling this increase in data, the UK Government is investing heavily in AI for the NHS, with funding in excess of £1 billion. The Government has identified AI and data as one of four areas in which the UK can lead the world in technology, estimating that it could add £232 billion to the UK economy by 2030 – the equivalent of 10% of GDP.
Timely, accurate, accessible and secure data
The need to accurately analyse patients and eliminate medical errors at the point of care has led to a push for medical device data to be integrated with clinical information systems. In order for this data to be of use to caregivers, and of benefit to patients, it needs to be timely, accurate, accessible and secure. Data availability is key, and this requires connectivity and interoperability between medical devices – from a variety of manufacturers – as well as seamless integration with a range of electronic patient record (EPR) systems.
“We all know that connectivity and interoperability are high on the national agenda. Data can now be recorded at every step of the patient’s journey, but for this to provide maximum value it needs to be brought together in a meaningful way,” comments Stephan Corr, Mindray’s senior product and marketing manager for Europe.
“A lot of data is produced from patient monitors, anaesthesia machines, infusion pumps and other medical equipment. Historically, this data was retained inside each of the individual devices. Now, the trend is to pull this information from all of these devices, aggregating the data and making it visible – by turning data into animated pictures, graphics and insightful interfaces for caregivers. This gives a full picture of the patient’s status, enabling better clinical decision-making, as well as ensuring treatment efficiency,” he continues.
Connected journey
It is important to ensure this data is available continuously, throughout the patient’s journey and at the point of care. Mindray’s monitoring solutions, such as the BeneVision range, combined with a collaborative approach to open network architecture and interoperability, are meeting this challenge – enabling many hospitals to design stable and reliable clinical data networks. This is supporting the seamless, real-time monitoring, recording and analysis of patient data, with the aim of improving patient safety and outcomes. Monitoring solutions that follow the patient, such as the Mindray N1, allow patient data to be continuously transmitted and recorded with third-party clinical information systems – from the moment the patient is admitted in the emergency department; throughout pre-op, anaesthesia, surgery, recovery; to critical care, step down and discharge. Implementing an ADT (admit, discharge and transfer) feed also helps remove human error associated with manual input of patient data.
“When a patient is admitted, instead of having to type their name, DOB, and gender into the system, the clinician simply clicks on ‘find patient’, scans the patient’s barcode and all of the demographics are pulled down. As the patient moves around the hospital, so do their demographics, maintaining the quality of the patient data. It also saves time – staff no longer have to spend lots of time inputting information by hand and it is much less prone to errors,” comments Tony Bayliss, Mindray’s connectivity product specialist.
Andreas Engels, Mindray’s patient monitoring life support IT product manager, points out that connectivity allows for remote access to data which can be particularly useful for the most acutely unwell patients:
“With a conventional monitoring set-up, there are a lot of alarms and noise from multiple devices that can disturb patients and worry relatives. Through connectivity, the alarm information from these devices can be made available at central stations and remotely on mobile devices, so that staff can react quickly, helping to reduce noise in the ICU and eliminating ‘alarm fatigue’ for staff.”
Interoperability and collaboration
In the UK, there is no single unified standard for the collection of and access to medical data. The simplified, interoperable approach to HL7, offered by Mindray’s eGateway integration engine, has resulted in successful data throughput to a wide range of EPR systems. Mindray has achieved connections quickly and effectively and in just 12 months, Mindray UK has achieved connectivity with more than eight diverse and distinct EPR systems, ranging from neonatal to adult applications. Among these include EPR systems from Cerner, Meditech, Epic, QuadraMed, iMDSoft, and ISIS.
“Connectivity is the future – the health service is moving towards an open approach and our technology supports this,” concludes Geoff Taylor, EU product specialist, PMLS IT Solutions, at Mindray. “We are agnostic in terms of the manufacturers’ technologies that our systems can communicate with and we can connect to any medical device – through a powerful integration engine, in the form of our eGateway. Our technology provides a ‘bridging’ solution – acting as a ‘swiss army knife’ of interoperability and inter-communications.”
System-wide benefits
“The benefits of connectivity are systemwide; not only does it provide caregivers with access to timely and accurate information, the visibility of medical devices on the network is also a significant benefit for clinical engineering departments,” comments, Mindray’s UK marketing manager, Jim Roberts. “They can quickly locate equipment and identify maintenance requirements, helping to efficiently manage the hospital’s fleet of technology.”
Holistic patient data
Integration of data from multiple devices, such as infusion pumps and anaesthetic machines, into Mindray patient monitors is achieved easily with Mindray’s BeneLink module, enabling caregivers to view holistic patient data from various devices in a single view. At the same time, through eGateway, the data from all bedside devices can be sent to the hospital’s information systems, providing a foundation to achieve a paperless workflow.
Tony Bayliss explains that the BeneLink system is used as a ‘hub’ to collect data from various devices, outputting this information as a single connection into the Trust’s integration engine. As the hospital only has to deal with one ‘integration’, this saves time and effort.
“Basildon University Hospital now has Maquet ventilators connected via Mindray’s BeneLink connectivity module, while the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital has connectivity with MetaVision – a critical care charting system. Instead of having multiple, separate connections, our solution allows many individual connections to be consolidated into a single output, which feeds the data into the electronic patient record,” Tony Bayliss comments.
R&D: expanding connectivity
As medical device technologies continue to advance, Mindray is continuously expanding its connectivity capabilities – enabling an array of third-party equipment to output data to the BeneVision monitoring system. There is an increasing trend in the electronic recording of anaesthetic data, in particular – driven by the goal of improving perioperative safety.
“We are building up a significant library of third-party machines and we have a commitment from our R&D department to develop up to 30 drivers within the next 12 months,” Tony Bayliss comments. The latest drivers include connection with Maquet’s extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) systems. Other connections include Dräger ventilators, dialysis machines, as well as haemodynamic and neuromuscular transmission monitors
“If necessary, the R&D team can meet very tight deadlines. The Royal Papworth Hospital, for example required CO2 waveforms to be outputted from a Dräger anaesthetic machine and this was developed in just two weeks,” comments Tony Bayliss. “When it comes to speed and responsiveness, we are setting the standard.”
“Medical devices are moving into the sphere of IT, which means clinical engineers and IT engineers need to find a common language and shared protocols. Our technology bridges this divide,” Geoff Taylor concludes. “The days of just delivering boxes is gone; hospitals want a total solution. As suppliers, we all have to work together if the NHS is to really achieve its goal of being fully digitised by 2024. It is all about connectivity.”
Mindray UK Limited
Mindray House,
Kingfisher Way,
Hinchingbrooke Business Park,
Huntingdon,
Cambs,
PE29 6FN
Tel: 01480 416840
Fax: 01480 436588
Web: www.mindrayuk.com
