6 minute read
Streamlining hospital processes
Hospitals need all the help they can get to manage patients successfully, says Elliott Engers, CEO of Infinity Health
As hospitals and healthcare outlets struggle to manage the after-effects of COVID-19, digital technologies offer many solutions. But it’s an uphill struggle for UK innovators as they try to convince the NHS to implement simple strategies that would make life easier for patients, clinicians and hospital staff.
Elliott Engers, CEO of Infinity Health, puts it very clearly. “We just haven’t embraced what technology is capable of doing,” he says. “From the moment someone enters an NHS hospital, the first interaction and beyond is fraught with inefficiencies and even clinical safety issues that patients may never be aware of. Healthcare moves at an unnecessarily slow pace which means it is far behind where it could be.
“The process that’s designed to protect people and minimise risk is now introducing or perpetuating risk that could be eliminated tomorrow with digital solutions,” he continues. “Other industries have spent 20 or 30 years developing new tools, and it’s clear to everyone that healthcare is lagging behind.”
Many digital innovations are clinicianled, developed at the coal face by doctors looking to make their working lives easier. Where they can manage nearly every facet of their daily lives digitally, they are often still dependent on paper lists in their work environment.
While Elliott himself doesn’t have a medical background, he developed the Infinity concept in conjunction with Dr Adam Benton, an orthopaedic surgeon. They had studied together at school, and when Elliott left university to join Virgin Records he saw how Apple disrupted the music industry with the invention of the iPod.
“We were curating the music, signing the acts, marketing them, making videos, doing all the press and promotion planning, but we had no direct relationship with actual listeners,” he says. “Then Apple demonstrated the technology that can emerge if you become the interface. They transformed an industry with that mindset, and they continue to do so.
“I could see that a similar approach would work with healthcare and that the possibilities were endless. It was finding the right problem to solve that took the time, until I heard Adam trying to do his surgical handover on the phone with a colleague and realised there was no simple way for them to do it without speaking to each other or leaving handwritten notes.”
The issue was how a small start-up could do anything meaningful in a space with such big incumbents. At the time mobile devices were beginning to last the whole day and their potential was quickly being tapped. “We developed a useful patient and task list that could be instantly updated and Infinity grew from there,” Elliott says.
Solving daily issues
Infinity is a task management platform for staff to share and coordinate in real time, using and modern mobile device or desktop computer. It can even be used on an iPod. It eases the burden on NHS staff by helping them to manage their workload more easily, collaborate with colleagues from across specialties, and gives visibility of the information they need, when they need it.
Using Infinity solves many communications issues and risks that arise with current paper-based processes, and that lead to more than one third of adverse events in healthcare.
The platform integrates with and sits alongside EHRs and EPRs, supporting staff to seamlessly coordinate from the point of care. This is safer for them, safer for patients, and more efficient.
“The NHS has different systems that work across hospitals, GP surgeries and in the community. We describe Infinity as being the glue and the lubricant between the different parts of the system because it is provider agnostic,” says Elliott. “We give staff the tools they need to work safely and effectively across different environments.”
By using the platform, clinicians and healthcare workers have greater visibility of their workload, enabling them to communicate more effectively. Crucially, it reduces the chance of things being missed, and saves many hours of valuable clinical time. The real time dashboard helps to improve patient flow and prevent bed-blocking, and improves handovers by sharing information in real time.
“We have a substantial resource management platform that can solve problems such as portering and bed blocking,” says Elliott. “We handle about 200,000 portering requests across two North London hospitals right now. Until then, requests for porters were done via paper and delays were inevitable as porters returned to base to pick up the next job. Clinicians would find their patients sitting in corridors and there would be no record of how long the porter would take to arrive. It created a huge amount of frustration and certainly didn’t promote teamwork. Now everyone has complete visibility and the process is much smoother.”
An unexpected outcome from the data was discovering just how hard porters were working and not being credited enough for accomplishing tasks in a difficult environment. “We have good understanding of how bad things are, but often not how good they are,” Elliott adds. “We need the tools to co-ordinate the care really well and let the clinicians know so they can review patients and move them along. Digital is the only way to do this.”
Helping hospitals with COVID solutions
The pandemic created an additional administrative burden for the NHS, requiring trusts to know the COVID status of their staff as much as possible. Here Infinity has been able to help several NHS trusts by providing a solution for staff to enter their test results and be notified if they need to isolate. University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust (UHSFT) rolled out Infinity’s staff selftesting system over a two-week period, along with The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, Stockport NHS Foundation Trust, and Barts Health NHS Trust.
As the UK faces the greatest ever waiting lists in the history of the NHS – some 5.7m – Elliott is confident that Infinity can help prioritise the caseloads. “I’m concerned about the huge staff burnout and the perfect storm that’s coming as winter approaches,’ he says. “We know that Infinity can help solve these problems and we are collating evidence that proves how much time can be saved by using our system.
“Much of our work is behind the scenes. For example, we can co-ordinate bed flow by creating task lists for cleaning teams, so the beds are turned around much more quickly. We can achieve this in much less time - minutes rather than several hours. The hospital management teams have to recognise the value within digital and not be constantly asking for more and more pilots. COVID has proved the NHS can act quickly and it needs to continue to do so.”
It’s clear that Infinity has only begun to scratch the surface of the administrative problems it could resolve. “Ultimately, we support hard working people caring for vulnerable patients,” he says. “We can help organisations that have workflow challenges and cost management problems, and we charge fair licencing fees. We’re not trying to make money out of integration - we want to demonstrate how much money can be saved and how many serious incidents can be avoided by using effective and even simple digital solutions that don’t cost a fortune. That’s what drives us.”
Elliott Engers CEO Infinity Health
Contact Information
hello@infinity.health
