Joe Fernandes, founder and CEO, BuzzStreets, kindly shared the following with Hospital Hub…
Digital health and care solutions provide a wide variety of support for the NHS, and with efficiencies come savings, freeing up funding to be used to help patients and innovate further. Here are just a few of the areas where exciting technologies are saving the NHS money.
Wayfinding
With over 85% of visitors asking for directions when they visit a hospital, indoor wayfinding, such as BuzzStreets, is an important step forward in making hospitals become more patient-oriented. Wayfinding enables patients and other visitors to navigate from outside the hospital all the way to the specific location they need, whether that is a bed on a ward, a consulting room, the café, or the pharmacy. This saves staff time; many times a day doctors and nurses are stopped (and therefore delayed) by visitors asking for directions; and often patients are late for appointments as they are lost within the hospital. Indoor Wayfinding solves both these problems.
BuzzStreets indoor way-finder for hospitals—which could help the NHS save over £240million per year—has already been successfully piloted at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital and is being rolled out to other hospital Trusts around the UK, starting with West Middlesex University Hospital.
Virtual wards
Virtual wards (also known as remote patient monitoring) teams mobile phones and wearable health technology to allow clinicians to keep a watchful eye on patients. Data is sent back to the hospital in real-time and if a patient’s vitals were to go downhill, a doctor or nurse can call the patient into the hospital for immediate treatment. See doccla.com for further details.
Independent living
Technology products are supporting vulnerable people, allowing them to live safely and independently for longer, and enable significant cost savings as emergency events (such as falls) and ambulance call-outs are reduced. This then also leads to fewer beds and emergency care in hospitals being required. More about the role of this technology can be seen here tunstall.co.uk
Virtual visits
‘NHS Book a virtual visit’ allows busy ward staff to book—easily and quickly and safely—visits between patients and their loved ones, wherever in the world those friends and family may be. Minimal data is required for this cloud-based service that was created within the principles of open source and to NHS Digital and Government Digital Service standards. More can be found here madetech.com
Mental health
Counselling services are now available anonymously and immediately. For example, Kooth gives children and young people immediate access to an online community of peers and a team of experienced, accredited counsellors. The service offers complete anonymity, it is open for support 365 days per year, and access is free of typical barriers to mental health support: no waiting times; no referrals; no thresholds to meet.
Healing help
The amount of nursing hours devoted to dressing and treating chronic wounds when they heal incredibly slowly is a huge issue. Accel-Heal is an electrical stimulation device helping patients heal, on average, 3.6 weeks faster than those given conventional treatment. For patients who are successfully healed in a 24-week period, there is a cost saving of almost £8,000 to the NHS, as well as more than a hundred weeks of GP and nurse time per 100 patients treated.
Prevention
Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) is a major healthcare burden, estimated to cost the NHS around £1billion per year. Medtech start-up Rinicare’s AI-driven STABILITY UO (urine output) can predict the future probability of low urine output in time for clinicians to take preventive action to reduce the risk of developing AKI, in addition it can help to guide clinicians in their discharge decisions for low-risk patients, allowing them to be moved out of critical care more quickly.
Please visit www.buzzstreets.com to find out more or follow them on twitter, facebook and YouTube
Joe Fernandes, founder and CEO of BuzzStreets, an award-winning navigation platform, that enables organisations (hospitals, shopping malls, airports, offices, stadiums, etc.) to offer their customers an indoor way-finder that allows them to navigate inside the building. The client arrives at the entrance or reception and then uses the bespoke app to navigate to the specific location (room, shop, check-in, office, or even seat) they need. BuzzStreets also supplies movement analytics that can help improve building efficiency and keep track of vital equipment.
