St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospital NHS Trust (STHK) has gone live with Refero’s latest telehealth and video consultation platform, allowing its clinicians and patients to have multi-party consultations with up to 50 participants, while delivering a robust and reliable experience for all. The new platform also provides complete integration with the System C’s Careflow Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system utilised by the Trust.
The platform will significantly reduce appointment administration time and support the addition of family members, carers, interpreters or other clinicians on a patient’s video consultation.
Patients are already benefitting from telehealth and video consultations in over 40 services provided by STHK, including its Cancer Drains Outreach Service, Stroke Review Service, Medicine for Older People Frailty Service; Speech and Language Therapy Service; Burns & Plastics, Breast Reconstruction Service and Gastroenterology, Liver Surveillance Service. Around 1,000 patients are digitally connected with the Trust’s clinicians to enable continual engagement via video consultation or messaging through a web portal, smartphone or tablet.
Refero has worked extensively with clinicians at the Trust to ensure increased efficiency, reliability and security with its telehealth and video platform. Other new features include secure waiting room call functionality, screen-sharing capabilities during a call and post-call follow up questionnaires.
The integration of the platform with the Trust’s existing EPR system supports a more seamless and efficient appointment and consultation process for both the clinician and patient involved. The solution utilises the Health Service Bus; a component of Orchestra eHealth Suite by Cloud21 x-tention. The integration platform will allow clinics to be onboarded easily, and further organisations can be integrated using the same underlying platform in the future.
Rowan Pritchard-Jones, medical director at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust comments, “The new multi-party functionality means we can provide the best possible care for our patients in a video consultation setting. It allows family members to join the consultation if needed, the opportunity for language interpreters to support patients from mixed nationalities, and indeed training our junior doctors in these unusual times of delivering specialist care.
We’ve already seen huge successes in the adoption of video consultation appointments in multiple departments over the past few months, so the new platform will take us to the next level and support our commitment to the continued uptake of our telehealth programme.”
Dan Worman, CEO of Refero says, “STHK was already ahead on its digital journey before the pandemic struck. Through the rapid programme roll out of telehealth services, it is an example to other NHS Trusts in providing patients and clinicians with the best possible care with the support of teleconsultation both now and into the future.”
Tony Corkett, founder director Cloud21, part of x-tention. adds: “As we know, the NHS is a complex set of institutional organisations and the digital layer underpinning the ecosystem is even more complex. Technology should support patients to navigate their way through this system but also ensure the information that would help the professionals flows through as well. The open nature of the technology provided to STHK enables the Trust to make significant inroads in the goal to achieve interoperability.”
