Manx Care Delivering Smart and Efficient Patient Care

Alcidion LtdManx Care, Isle of Man were looking for solutions to replace an outdated legacy paging system that resulted in failed and delayed messaging impacting emergency response, with a modern progressive method of communication. To address this challenge, Manx Care embarked on a project with Alcidion to deploy Smartpage Clinical, with a view to introduce Smartpage Non-Clinical and Smartpage Response in later project phases.

Manx Care innovating health and care services

Manx Care is the Isle of Man organisation tasked with delivering health and care services to the Island’s population. The start of a new era in public services on the island was marked on April 1, 2021. It involved the restructuring of the largest department in the IOM Government. This consisted of the separation of Department of Health and Social Care functions and the creation of a bespoke operational body.

The first organisation of its kind in the IOM, Manx Care is an entirely new statutory body, designed to operate at arms’ length from the Department of Health and Social Care and focusing on the delivery of services to the public. The organisation is led by an executive leadership team, employing around 2,500 health and care staff and covering a geographic area of 221 square miles with a population of over 84,000.

The two hospitals that Manx Care supports includes Noble’s Hospital, with 314 acute care beds (20 ward areas), and Ramsey Cottage Hospital with 48 beds (2 ward areas), each managing annual admissions/discharges of 20,038 and annual ED attendances of over 31,000.

Overcoming the challenge

The acute care group of Manx Care needed a reliable two-way messaging solution that would facilitate quick, auditable, accurate, accessible, patient-specific messaging to improve both communication and clinical work-streams and to benefit patient care. The solution was required for both emergency and non-emergency clinical scenarios across the hospitals.

Working alongside Manx Care’s chief clinical information officer Dr Gregor Peden, chief nursing information officer Rebecca Erani and supported by the Government Technology Services Team, Alcidion's Smartpage Clinical was selected to be deployed across the acute care services.

Improving clinical support and patient care

Alcidion's Smartpage Clinical provided Manx Care with a secure app for clinical staff to send and receive messages more efficiently and in a more structured, patient centred format without taking them away from delivering patient care.

Smartpage Clinical ensures confidentiality is maintained and gives clinicians the ability for instant two-way messaging, enabling rapid clinical decision making and effective patient care support. The solution also allows staff to create and share tasks according to their availability and workload, a key priority for the Manx Care digital team.

Smartpage Response contains an emergency paging system allowing the emergency group alerting to be sent out via an emergency ‘dashboard’ by switchboard and received by clinicians via the same Smartpage app. The Smartpage solution provides a more interactive, two-way, visible method of emergency paging which enables team communication and support for efficient working between both clinical staff, switchboard and emergency teams at Manx Care.

Delivering a flexible and supportive approach

The Smartpage Clinical and Smartpage Response capabilities have been extremely well received across Manx Care due to the simplicity, reliability and functionality of the system. Alcidion's Smartpage implementation team offered a flexible and supportive approach and based on feedback during User Acceptance Testing and clinical practice, evolved the system to meet Manx Care's needs.

Commenting on the benefits Dr Gregor Peden, chief clinical information officer, Manx Care, said: "Smartpage has provided Noble’s Hospital with a modern and intuitive messaging tool that helps to improve care and drive task efficiency by providing clinically rich information at the point of care. Working innovatively with Alcidion to deliver a product that met the needs of front-line staff meant that our roll out and user adoption was relatively effortless."

Rebecca Erani, chief nursing information officer, Manx Care, also commented: "Through simple, person-centred technology, Smartpage has supported effective, concise communication delivered to the right person at the right time. This in turn has enabled more time focused on patient care and less time chasing information or clinician input, which is something as a collective workforce we are all striving towards."

Other positive feedback from users of the system include that fact that clinical staff no longer have to waste time bleeping staff members and second guessing if they have received the bleep. Plus there is no longer a need to move away from assessing patients to go to a phone as now it is possible to see from a glance of the Smartpage phone who and why someone is messaging so that staff can prioritise accordingly.

The new system has been reported as being much quicker to use and has vastly improved the content and structure of patient information, for example the use of SBAR, especially in relation to the referral or escalation of acuity. It is now possible for staff to see which other emergency team members are responding to an emergency which helps with planning and organising workload if multiple emergency pages are received.

Looking ahead to the future

Due to the successful implementation of Smartpage Clinical in secondary care, Manx Care are reviewing options to begin onboarding Smartpage to general practitioners and district nurse teams as an effective communication tool to refer patients and request support where needed.

Secondary care is also expanding to incorporate Smartpage Non-Clinical for porters and housekeepers and integrate it directly with Alcidion's Patientrack to enable automatic alerting based on National Early Warning Score (NEWS2).

Manx Care have seen an improvement in the acute referral process from the emergency department to inpatient care, in terms of referral acceptance and time to specialty review. Nursing staff feel more confident and empowered to escalate patient care using Smartpage. With Patientrack to be integrated shortly, they will also be able to track escalation response.

About Alcidion

Alcidion Group Limited (Alcidion) has a simple purpose, that is, to transform healthcare with proactive, smart, intuitive technology solutions that improve the efficiency and quality of patient care in healthcare organisations, worldwide.

Alcidion offers a complementary set of software products and technical services that create a unique offering in the global healthcare market. Based on the flagship product, Miya Precision, the solutions aggregate meaningful information to centralised dashboards, support interoperability, facilitate communication and task management in clinical and operational settings and deliver Clinical Decision Support at the point of care; all in support of Alcidion’s mission to improve patient outcomes.

Since listing on the ASX in 2011, Alcidion has acquired multiple healthcare IT companies and expanded its foothold in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand to now service over 300 hospitals and 60 healthcare organisations, with further geographical expansion planned.

With over 20 years of healthcare experience, Alcidion brings together the very best in technology and market knowledge to deliver solutions that make healthcare better for everyone.

Most Popular Now

AI also Assesses Dutch Mammograms Better…

AI is detecting tumors more often and earlier in the Dutch breast cancer screening program. Those tumors can then be treated at an earlier stage. This has been demonstrated by...

Unlocking the 10 Year Health Plan

The government's plan for the NHS is a huge document. Jane Stephenson, chief executive of SPARK TSL, argues the key to unlocking its digital ambitions is to consider what it...

AI can Find Cancer Pathologists Miss

Men assessed as healthy after a pathologist analyses their tissue sample may still have an early form of prostate cancer. Using AI, researchers at Uppsala University have been able to...

Alcidion Grows Top Talent in the UK, wit…

Alcidion has today announced the addition of three new appointments to their UK-based team, with one internal promotion and two external recruits. Dr Paul Deffley has been announced as the...

How AI could Speed the Development of RN…

Using artificial intelligence (AI), MIT researchers have come up with a new way to design nanoparticles that can more efficiently deliver RNA vaccines and other types of RNA therapies. After training...

AI, Full Automation could Expand Artific…

Automated insulin delivery (AID) systems such as the UVA Health-developed artificial pancreas could help more type 1 diabetes patients if the devices become fully automated, according to a new review...

MIT Researchers Use Generative AI to Des…

With help from artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have designed novel antibiotics that can combat two hard-to-treat infections: drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae and multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Using generative AI algorithms, the research...

Penn Developed AI Tools and Datasets Hel…

Doctors treating kidney disease have long depended on trial-and-error to find the best therapies for individual patients. Now, new artificial intelligence (AI) tools developed by researchers in the Perelman School...

AI Hybrid Strategy Improves Mammogram In…

A hybrid reading strategy for screening mammography, developed by Dutch researchers and deployed retrospectively to more than 40,000 exams, reduced radiologist workload by 38% without changing recall or cancer detection...

New Training Year Starts at Siemens Heal…

In September, 197 school graduates will start their vocational training or dual studies in Germany at Siemens Healthineers. 117 apprentices and 80 dual students will begin their careers at Siemens...

Routine AI Assistance may Lead to Loss o…

The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) to assist colonoscopies is linked to a reduction in the ability of endoscopists (health professionals who perform colonoscopies) to detect precancerous growths (adenomas) in...

New AI Tool Addresses Accuracy and Fairn…

A team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has developed a new method to identify and reduce biases in datasets used to train machine-learning algorithms...