NHS Lanarkshire to advance Scotland’s patient safety agenda with Patientrack

An early warning system that helps busy doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to quickly identify when patients are at risk of deterioration is to be deployed across hospitals and community settings throughout Lanarkshire.

Patientrack, which first hit headlines in Scotland for helping staff at NHS Fife to transform clinical practice and to significantly cut cardiac arrests, will now be deployed across the entirety of NHS Lanarkshire as part of a new five-year contract with smart health technology provider, Alcidion.

The decision follows a robust trial of the Patientrack electronic observations and alerting system at University Hospital Monklands.

The system was deployed into the hospital’s Operational Command Centre – the first of its kind anywhere in Scotland – where large-scale screens show staff the status of each patient throughout the hospital.

The new agreement will see Patientrack rapidly expanded to help many of the 12,000 staff working in NHS Lanarkshire’s communities, health centres, clinics and at three district general hospitals – University Hospital Hairmyres, University Hospital Monklands, and University Hospital Wishaw.

The project at NHS Lanarkshire is a direct response to an active clinical demand for a technology that is genuinely useful for hard-working NHS professionals

Donald Wilson, NHS Lanarkshire’s director of information and digital technology, said: “This implementation of Patientrack will expand on what we have learned from the Monklands digital hospital initiative and its links to the command centre we have established at the current site.”

In NHS Lanarkshire’s three acute hospitals, Patientrack will allow nurses to digitally capture patient vital signs at the bedside before it automatically calculates a patient’s early warning score and alerts clinicians to attend when needed.

In the community, the system will be configured to the specific needs of a range of relevant services, for example, mental health.

Lynette Ousby, UK general manager for Alcidion, said: “The project at NHS Lanarkshire is a direct response to an active clinical demand for a technology that is genuinely useful for hard-working NHS professionals.

“The expansion of Patientrack across NHS Lanarkshire is demonstrable of an appetite in Scotland to use health tech to deliver the best and safest care possible for patients.”

Patientrack is also used more widely in other parts of the UK to spot patient deterioration and allow early intervention.

The expansion of Patientrack across NHS Lanarkshire is demonstrable of an appetite in Scotland to use health tech to deliver the best and safest care possible for patients

Hospitals in England, for example, have innovated with the system to help identify and manage conditions including sepsis, and to even predict and prevent deadly illnesses such as hospital-acquired acute kidney injury.

Alcidion also plans to launch a new technology into the NHS during 2020 in order to provide the NHS with new options around integrating and realising more value from existing IT, and in embracing modern technologies that can automate thousands of routine processes and care plans currently manually delivered by doctors and nurses.

Alcidion group managing director, Kate Quirke, said: “Supporting the delivery of NHS Lanarkshire’s clinical and technology strategy is an important opportunity for Alcidion.

“The NHS is a core focus for Alcidion globally, and Scotland is an important part of that focus as we work to help hospitals advance patient safety and to use technology to make the right thing to do the easiest thing to do.”