The Journey to Connected Healthcare

The journey to connected healthcare

We live in an increasingly connected world; technology infiltrates nearly every aspect of daily modern life, and healthcare is no exception. The journey to connected healthcare has well and truly begun, with the entire NHS needing to provide electronic records by 2020. In partnership, Fortrus and MCSA are contributing to this journey, by helping to provide and develop solutions that can make the adoption of such technologies far easier.

Why Connected Healthcare?

With the need for cost-effective healthcare increasing, budget is one of the main reasons for adopting technology in the healthcare industry. There is also a funding gap of £30 billion in the NHS so wherever savings can be made to help make the gap that bit smaller is well received.

Digitising patient records mean that healthcare professionals and carers can access information quickly and with ease, resulting in Nurses spending 60% less time doing paperwork. This time saving has been reported to provide a 29% increase in patient face time and in some cases even resulted in up to two more patients being seen daily. It is clear that this wide scale adoption of connected healthcare is essential for future-proofing the healthcare system.

So, how are Fortrus and MCSA working together?

MCSA and Fortrus are working in partnership to help the NHS achieve connected healthcare. Fortrus provide bespoke solutions and user interfaces, enabling NHS Trusts to digitise their patient records. ‘Unity’, from Fortrus acts as a control layer across multiple databases. This ensures rapid access to all patient data via highly flexible user interfaces designed specifically for the Trusts environment. The outcome is more time, less cost, and a higher standard of informed decision-making for any clinical team.

Fortrus also work closely with the clinicians to ensure the interfaces are fit for purpose, helping the NHS to meet their connected healthcare goals.

MCSA are working with Fortrus to provide and deploy solutions to healthcare organisations that can be used to address the issues they face. Fortrus’ solutions also require hardware and storage, so MCSA is able to provide a complete service when it comes to delivering, managing and maintaining that hardware.

But the process isn’t as straightforward as it may seem; it requires careful planning and expertise on both sides of the partnership. Leigh Baillie, Chief Marketing Officer at Fortrus comments, “The NHS deals with a wide range of local services and agencies that all link to and interact with patient care. Trusts hold and collate a huge amount of information that needs to be shared with multiple services. So what we do is help these organisations interact with each other and share information far more effectively.”

Great examples of where Fortrus and MCSA are working in partnership are at the Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospital Trust and Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. NHS England recently announced a list of 12 hospitals with global exemplar status deemed to be digitally strong.

The Royal Liverpool University Hospital in particular was recently announced as one of twelve “global exemplar” trusts in line for funding as part of investment into technology and infrastructure to enhance staff training and digital technology. David Walliker, Director of Information Technology at the Royal said, “This is fantastic news for our Trust. In our recent CQC report our innovative projects were highlighted as ‘outstanding’.”

“The news that the Trust will be awarded this accolade really demonstrates our commitment to making our services better for patients. By responding to developments in technology and recognising that most people are using mobile technology to access health information means that we can be at the forefront of delivering this type of technology for our patients to improve services.”

David concluded, “Success will be when digital excellence becomes the very DNA of how we deliver, improve and experience health and social care for our patients and staff and that we act as exemplar and implementation partner to other NHS organisations.”