Rob Hurrell, Business Development Director at Aire Logic, outlines the need for digital solutions as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic
Digital solutions have been on a meteoric rise over the past 10 years. If we consider where we were at the beginning of the 2010s, it’s a frightening thought as to how we may have dealt with the coronavirus pandemic without them.
Efficiency, for one, would have been irreparably damaged – and this is not only due to coronavirus. As we have seen throughout the digital age, solutions in all sectors, not just healthcare, have helped to increase drastically the speed at which organisations and individuals operate.
However, the digital revolution is nowhere near finished. We must strive to continue to develop, research, and implement new technologies where they are necessary – and remove the obsolete systems which are a hindrance to proper practice.
Within the health sector particularly, organisations have pushed for years and years to implement digital solutions as a tool to reduce cost and improve patient care. But this is far too broad a task to tackle, and results are often slow to materialise, and even slower to develop. COVID has actually helped in this regard, as we can see what we can achieve under pressure.
Lessons learned
Aire Logic’s ethos was formed out of the lessons learned from the NHS National Programme for IT – to see how we could do things differently – and more successfully.
Some of these ideas didn’t bear fruit – but many of them did, and the potential for value was immediate. We think strategically and begin with a minimum viable product that will rapidly scale into a platform that will have an immediate benefit. That’s the aim of the game.
Our chief platform, Forms4Health, is an intuitive, easily integrated form system, designed to place an organisation in full control of their own IT – and enable both the patient and the clinician to take charge of their information without the need for convoluted (and outdated) processes.
Our platforms work on a phone or on a tablet – in fact, on any common device. You could be a clinician or a patient, and you can use it in any context you need without having to keep up with user portals or remember logins.
Generally, people tend to stop using patient applications and portals after a time. However, receiving a link and a text, saying you’ve got an upcoming appointment or a vaccine booking, gets an excellent response – as it eliminates the need for unnecessary effort at the user end.
At Leeds Community Healthcare, for example, we were able to reduce the number of people who were given six-month appointments for chronic conditions. Often, these consultations would consist of the patient arriving at their appointment, reporting that they were healthy and their symptoms were managed well, and then leaving within five minutes, with another appointment booked in six months.
This was a clear waste of time for both the clinician and the patient. But still, it was necessary – patients had to check in, and clinicians had to ensure that their patients were still healthy and that their symptoms were well managed.
However, these are questions that can be asked in five minutes on a form. In implementing our solution for this purpose, we reduced unnecessary appointments by more than 50 per cent.
The knock-on effect was that clinicians were able to treat all the complex cases more effectively, and patients didn’t have to make the journey to the hospital or clinic when they knew the appointment would only last five minutes – even more valuable in the age of coronavirus.
Building services from the bottom up
One major problem we have encountered is that many providers have a desire to improve their services through digital health solutions, but cannot quite pin down the areas where they want it, or even require it. In many organisations, there is a real understanding of the importance of moving forward – but no idea how to implement and integrate with new technology.
This is an important recognition – you can’t fault organisations for want of trying. So if someone comes to us looking for a new solution, we don’t just say come back to us in six weeks with your specification. Organisations won’t know what a solution is going to look like at the initial stages of a project. But, if you have a solid starting point with four or five key things that you’re looking to achieve, we will find something that you can trial and instill in your organisation. Then we can develop – which is a far more rapid route to a working solution.
Our work with Leeds Teaching hospital started with a very simple forms engagement. We took a paper form that was a bit clunky by and provided additional utility by allowing the clinicians to develop the form through the user experience, rather than with a focus on technology.
That is how our offering works, especially our platform – it consists of very simple building blocks. You don’t have to be a developer or coder to understand it – and it’s very quick and intuitive for people to create those forms on our platform themselves for whatever needs they have.
From this single-use case, Leeds Hospital developed and built a system of their own IP and our forms section is the basis of their electronic patient record. It is by some measure the largest in the country, surpassing around 1.8m form submissions a month using our solution.
The crux of Aire Logic is to provide something useful that can expand very quickly, particularly with clinical involvement. Organisations can see the power of practical use immediately through an application, and realise the potential of digital solutions with ease.
Contact Information
robert.hurrell@airelogic.com
www.airelogic.com