St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospital NHS Trust (STHK) has gone live with Refero’s telehealth and video consultation platform, enabling clinicians and patients to have multi-party consultations with up to 50 participants.
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 and plastics, and breast reconstruction 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 to ensure increased efficiency, reliability, and security with its telehealth and video platform.
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
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 clinician and patient.
And 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 the trust, said: “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, and gives the opportunity for language interpreters to support patients from mixed nationalities, and to help with training our junior doctors in these unusual times of delivering specialist care.
Through the rapid programme rollout of telehealth services, it is an example to other NHS trusts in providing patients and clinicians with the best-possible 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, chief executive of Refero, adds: “STHK was already ahead on its digital journey before the pandemic struck.
“Through the rapid programme rollout 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.”
