Patientrack Proving Its Worth in the North West

St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust have announced that Patientrack has cut high-risk admissions, calls to the emergency team and time spent performing observations substantially.

The northern trust went live with the mobile system across 55 wards in January 2016, and have implemented the Somerset-based company's software in A&E since.

Since deployment in early last year, there have been significant, and notable benefits, for the trust than that of previous.

High-risk admissions to the critical care unit have fallen from 10% to 5%, calls to the medical emergency team have decreased by a fifth, and time taken to conduct observations has diminished by two thirds.

"By automating something that was quite a clunky, albeit necessary, paper system, it’s driving that combination of both efficiency and most importantly, patient safety”, Rowan Pritchard-Jones, consultant plastic reconstructive surgeon at the trust, told Digital Health.

Patientrack, which is an e-observations system used on iPads at St Helens and Knowsley, allows the trust's clinicians to record vital signs and calculate a patient’s early warning score.

Which has been recognised with the use of the system at Whiston and St Helens Hospitals called a “compelling example of an NHS trust taking the initiative with innovative technology to make important advances in patient safety” by Donald Kennedy, managing director of Patientrack.

The software is currently being utilised in eight different NHS trusts across the Midlands and North of England, as well as NHS Fife in Scotland - with the latter recently receiving EHI's coveted "best use of IT to promote patient safety" award at the 2016 ceremony for their use of Patientrack.