Manx Care, Isle of Man were looking for solutions to replace an outdated legacy paging system that resulted in failed and delayed messaging impacting emergency response, with a modern progressive method of communication.
To address this challenge, Manx Care embarked on a project with Alcidion to deploy Smartpage Clinical, with a view to introduce Smartpage Non-Clinical and Smartpage Response in later project phases.
Manx Care innovating health and care services
Manx Care is the Isle of Man organisation tasked with delivering health and care services to the Island’s population. The start of a new era in public services on the island was marked on April 1, 2021. It involved the restructuring of the largest department in the IOM Government. This consisted of the separation of Department of Health and Social Care functions and the creation of a bespoke operational body.
The first organisation of its kind in the IOM, Manx Care is an entirely new statutory body, designed to operate at arms’ length from the Department of Health and Social Care and focusing on the delivery of services to the public. The organisation is led by an executive leadership team, employing around 2,500 health and care staff and covering a geographic area of 221 square miles with a population of over 84,000.
The two hospitals that Manx Care supports includes Noble’s Hospital, with 314 acute care beds (20 ward areas), and Ramsey Cottage Hospital with 48 beds (2 ward areas), each managing annual admissions/discharges of 20,038 and annual ED attendances of over 31,000.
Overcoming the challenge
The acute care group of Manx Care needed a reliable two-way messaging solution that would facilitate quick, auditable, accurate, accessible, patient-specific messaging to improve both communication and clinical work-streams and to benefit patient care. The solution was required for both emergency and non-emergency clinical scenarios across the hospitals.
Working alongside Manx Care’s chief clinical information officer Dr Gregor Peden, chief nursing information officer Rebecca Erani and supported by the Government Technology Services Team, Alcidion’s Smartpage Clinical was selected to be deployed across the acute care services.
Improving clinical support and patient care
Alcidion’s Smartpage Clinical provided Manx Care with a secure app for clinical staff to send and receive messages more efficiently and in a more structured, patient centred format without taking them away from delivering patient care.
Smartpage Clinical ensures confidentiality is maintained and gives clinicians the ability for instant two-way messaging, enabling rapid clinical decision making and effective patient care support. The solution also allows staff to create and share tasks according to their availability and workload, a key priority for the Manx Care digital team.
Smartpage Response contains an emergency paging system allowing the emergency group alerting to be sent out via an emergency ‘dashboard’ by switchboard and received by clinicians via the same Smartpage app. The Smartpage solution provides a more interactive, two-way, visible method of emergency paging which enables team communication and support for efficient working between both clinical staff, switchboard and emergency teams at Manx Care.
Delivering a flexible and supportive approach
The Smartpage Clinical and Smartpage Response capabilities have been extremely well received across Manx Care due to the simplicity, reliability and functionality of the system. Alcidion’s Smartpage implementation team offered a flexible and supportive approach and based on feedback during User Acceptance Testing and clinical practice, evolved the system to meet Manx Care’s needs.
Commenting on the benefits Dr Gregor Peden, chief clinical information officer, Manx Care, said: “Smartpage has provided Noble’s Hospital with a modern and intuitive messaging tool that helps to improve care and drive task efficiency by providing clinically rich information at the point of care. Working innovatively with Alcidion to deliver a product that met the needs of front-line staff meant that our roll out and user adoption was relatively effortless.”
Rebecca Erani, chief nursing information officer, Manx Care, also commented: “Through simple, person-centred technology, Smartpage has supported effective, concise communication delivered to the right person at the right time. This in turn has enabled more time focused on patient care and less time chasing information or clinician input, which is something as a collective workforce we are all striving towards.”
Other positive feedback from users of the system include that fact that clinical staff no longer have to waste time bleeping staff members and second guessing if they have received the bleep. Plus there is no longer a need to move away from assessing patients to go to a phone as now it is possible to see from a glance of the Smartpage phone who and why someone is messaging so that staff can prioritise accordingly.
The new system has been reported as being much quicker to use and has vastly improved the content and structure of patient information, for example the use of SBAR, especially in relation to the referral or escalation of acuity. It is now possible for staff to see which other emergency team members are responding to an emergency which helps with planning and organising workload if multiple emergency pages are received.
Looking ahead to the future
Due to the successful implementation of Smartpage Clinical in secondary care, Manx Care are reviewing options to begin onboarding Smartpage to general practitioners and district nurse teams as an effective communication tool to refer patients and request support where needed.
Secondary care is also expanding to incorporate Smartpage Non-Clinical for porters and housekeepers and integrate it directly with Alcidion’s Patientrack to enable automatic alerting based on National Early Warning Score (NEWS2).
Manx Care have seen an improvement in the acute referral process from the emergency department to inpatient care, in terms of referral acceptance and time to specialty review.
Nursing staff feel more confident and empowered to escalate patient care using Smartpage. With Patientrack to be integrated shortly, they will also be able to track escalation response.