TECHNOLOGY
How digitalisation will advance patient care
The digitalisation of patient care records has progressed rapidly in recent years. However, patient data is not always used to its full potential. Adil Hazara and colleagues from Academic Renal Research at Hull University Teaching Hospitals, and Hull York Medical School, highlight the need to use stored clinical data more efficiently for patient care.
Prominent among the key principles that guide the functioning of a modern and nationwide healthcare service, such as the National Health Service (NHS), is to ensure the provision of high quality care that is safe, effective and focused on patient experience, while being cost effective.1
From
the moment patients first come in to contact with health services, and at every step along their journey until the termination of a care episode, healthcare providers collect and process vast amounts of clinical data related to multiple aspects of patient care. Efficiently managing the flow of information from patients into the hands of healthcare providers and then back to patients, who are ultimately at the centre of care activity (hence completing an information loop), is key if a healthcare system is to ultimately fulfil its fundamental aim of improving patients’ health and wellbeing.
Consider the example of a patient visiting a specialised out-patients clinic to receive ‘routine’ follow-up care for their chronic health condition (e.g. chronic kidney disease). Such a patient would first ‘check in’ to the clinic by entering their details into an automated check-in station (which of course requires regular cleaning, particularly in view of the current COVID-19 pandemic). They would then have their vital observations recorded and a urine sample analysed before
seeing the specialist. Information gathered at each step (e.g. weight measurements, blood pressure readings, results of urinalysis tests etc.) are still mostly recorded manually on paper case notes, in the first instance, in many hospitals.
Clinicians add their own assessments to this and, along with key (but not all) data collected that day, make further entries in the case notes. A secretary then prepares
In the day-to-day care of patients, there is a growing need for better integration of smart devices that automate data entry and transmission and for innovative ways of making such data available to healthcare workers and patients.
NOVEMBER 2020
this information in the form of a ‘clinic letter’ addressed to general practitioners – these documents contain care plans and are often useful to any healthcare professional involved in patient care.
Despite rapid advancements in technology in other disciplines, the continued reliance in healthcare on making hand-written entries in paper case notes, or even the typing of this information into ‘PDFs’ or ‘Word’ file formats, traps potentially important data/information in remote corners within patient records. This becomes further obscured by multiple layers of later entries limiting its accessibility. Most importantly, patients at the centre of care gain very little in terms of feedback for the management of their condition; very rarely do they get sight of the full extent of information collected in their name. In the example above, the introduction of
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