Digital Services

Search View all results Filter by Type Select all Pages Blog posts Case studies Books News Articles Events Challenge London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust needed a solution to reduce emotional stress during Covid-19. Approach We developed a simple, secure digital service to help ward staff book virtual visits between patients and loved ones. Result NHS Book a Virtual Visit was developed in 48 hours and in 10 months, it enabled over 20,000 virtual visits. Challenge London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust (LNWH) was at the epicentre of the fight against coronavirus early on. As the trust started to shut its doors to visitors, it became clear one of the greatest challenges facing clinicians and staff, was the loss of communication between doctors, patients and their loved ones. They needed to find a way to reduce the emotional stress on patients, their families and staff. Our approach The solution needed to schedule a visit between a patient in a ward with a loved one and provide a seamless experience that didn’t require much data from either side. It needed to work on ward Wi-Fi and on a variety of devices. It had to to be simple for patients, clinicians and ward staff to use. Crucially we needed to make it a secure solution that only kept personal data for as long as it was needed once the call had expired. NHS Book a virtual visit is a simple to use digital service that enables ward staff to easily and quickly book visits between patients and loved ones, with minimal data required to support the visit. Hosted in the cloud and created within the principles of open source and to GDS and NHS Digital standards, the secure and OS agnostic solution does not require users to install any third-party applications. It can be accessed via any website browser and works across all devices. Connecting loved ones with virtual visits at this time is incredibly important. I want our patients to have access to the support they need, and for our ward staff to have a solution that is intuitive to use and allows them to spend more time caring for their patients, in extremely challenging circumstances. Thank you we for standing up an alpha app within 48 hours. Sonia Patel CIO of London North West Healthcare NHS Trust and The Hillingdon Hospitals Foundation Trust Results we achieved together The alpha product was delivered in 48 hours . Two weeks later, NHS Book a virtual visit was on wards being used by patients and clinicians. Ten months after its initial rollout, NHS Book a virtual visit has been rolled out to five hospitals , including Kettering General Hospital . It has enabled over 20,000 virtual visits in both COVID and non-COVID settings across every hospital ward in the Trust, with an average of 38 visits taking place each day . A digital service that enables ward staff to easily and quickly book in visits . A product hosted entirely in the cloud and to GDS and NHS Digital standards . The service can be accessed through any website browser . The pandemic was not on a roadmap. We could not plan for resources, anticipate user needs or have the privilege of time to plan and build products and services in response to it. From Building great digital services during a crisis on the NHS Digital Blog Made Well Collective The new way to collaborate on, co-fund and reuse digital technology in the NHS. Digital service delivery We support you at every point in the delivery lifecycle, right from defining the problem right through to the live services that solve them. In the news Awards the service has won or was shortlisted for: Winner of “Healthcare Project of the Year” at the UK IT Industry Awards 2020 Shortlisted for “Acute Sector Innovation of the Year at the HSJ Awards 2020 Press coverage on this project: How coronavirus reshaped the NHS London North West University rolls out virtual visit solution Kettering General Hospital introduces virtual visit solution Speak with an expert Tags Digital service delivery Health and care Stay in the loop Get expert insights delivered monthly Blog Post Evolving the NHS Book a virtual visit service with Kettering General Hospital We spoke to Ian Roddis, Deputy CDIO, and Anna Awoliyi, Chief Allied Health Information Officer for Kettering General Hospital about how we collaboratively worked with ward staff and patients to improve the NHS Book a virtual visit service based on user research. Blog Post Connecting loved ones: building the NHS Book a virtual visit service in 48 hours The simple digital service enables ward staff to book in calls which we hope will reduce the burden on staff having to do this manually and reduce the number of calls to wards from loved ones. From the loved ones perspective they receive an SMS stating when their virtual visit is booked for and receive a unique link to join the call when the ward is ready. 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