During the early days of the pandemic, many healthcare systems around the world felt they were a day late and a pound short with digitalisation.
Paperwork bogged down clinicians and delayed patient care.
Siloed information systems and disparate communication platforms made well-coordinated operations and fully informed decisions practically impossible.
And the lack of real-time asset visibility made everyone’s jobs far harder than they needed to be.
But, if you were to ask NHS clinicians and leaders if they felt debilitated by a lack of technology these past two years, I bet many would say ‘no.’
They had a unique technology advantage thanks to forward-thinking leaders, open-minded clinicians and diligent IT teams.
Slow and steady wins the race, along with the occasional sprint
The NHS may have a reputation for being a ‘slow, old business’ when it comes to technology modernisation, but it was actually among the first healthcare systems in the world to start digitising data and automating workflows over a decade ago.
In fact, the NHS started printing barcoded wristbands from Zebra in 2008 to remove the human error factor from the patient care equation and make positive patient identification (PPID) simple for care team members.
By making this single change – perhaps a baby step in the scheme of things – staff no longer had to stop what they were doing to fill in wristbands or waste precious time trying to interpret illegible handwriting.
With a single barcode scan, data could immediately be extracted from digital patient records and clinicians could confirm a patient’s family name, first name, date of birth, and NHS number in a couple seconds time.
It made such a huge difference in the patient experience and clinical workflow that NHS England began to further investigate ways to leverage barcode-based data – and automated data capture technologies overall.
In fact, when the UK Government’s Department of Health and Social Care launched Scan4Safety in 2016, the NHS was already well-versed and fully invested in barcoding scanning and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies.
This enabled several NHS sites, including the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, to quickly adopt GS1 standards-based solutions for patient care tracking, equipment performance monitoring and medical supplies management per the Scan4Safety programme directive.
Almost immediately, 140,000 hours of clinical time were freed-up and some trusts reported nearly £5 million of recurrent inventory savings and £9m of non-recurrent inventory reductions.
Leeds’ staff say the average time taken for product recalls has fallen from 8.33 days to less than 35 minutes.
And leaders from the North Tees and Hartlepool Hospital NHS Trust estimated Scan4Safety had released 22,000 hours of time to care in a matter of months by helping to reduce adverse drug effects and therefore reducing incident reporting time.
Though numbers like this speak to the benefits of barcode and RFID technology, I think some of the comments made by NHS physicians and staff are even more powerful.
Especially this one from Lorna Wilkinson, director of nursing and midwifery during the Scan4Safety demonstrator project, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust.
“One of the surgeons once asked me: ‘Would you have surgery in a hospital that didn’t scan’ and I firmly said: ‘No. I wouldn’t.’
“I wouldn’t want surgery in a hospital that didn’t scan. How do they know what they’re putting into me, and where is that in my record for any future recall or any complication?”
Now that trust in technology has been established, where will the NHS and other healthcare systems around the world go next? Beyond the barcode? To fully automated workflows?
The sky’s the limit, though near-term actions appear grounded in fundamental process refinements and the prioritisation of staff care as many across NHS play a bit of catchup on the digitalisation journey they started before the pandemic.
Sustaining innovation to support ongoing, growing operations
Wayne Miller, director of healthcare at EMEA, Zebra Technologies
In Zebra’s Global Healthcare Vision Study, approximately 80 per cent of executives said they plan to automate workflows in the next year to improve supply chain management, make it easier to locate critical equipment and medical assets, better orchestrate emergency rooms and operating rooms, and streamline staff scheduling.
About three-quarters plan to use locationing technologies such as RFID to better track equipment and specimens – such as what we’re seeing with new blood product traceability solutions.
Administrators are also turning to locationing solutions to create more dynamic workflows, improve patient flow and security, and improve staff efficiency, safety and compliance.
Across the NHS specifically, several efforts are underway to build on the initial Scan4Safety programme, scale existing solutions, and integrate additional technologies that help clinicians make the right decisions and take the right actions in high-pressure situations.
For example, more hospitals – like Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust – are turning to healthcare-grade handheld mobile computers that can tolerate frequent clinical wipe downs, support PPID and empower nurses to record each patient-nurse-treatment interaction quickly, securely and accurately. This facilitates continuity of care while helping to protect patient privacy.
And it wouldn’t be so far-fetched to think more advanced technologies will become commonplace across NHS – and global healthcare systems – in the coming months.
Automation is garnering more celebration than resistance among front-line workers who appreciate all the help they can get.
As Professor Sir Terence Stephenson, Nuffield professor of child health, UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and chair of the Health Research Authority for England said in the Scan4Safety report:
“Artificial intelligence, robotics, GS1 data entry can free up the time of people like me – practicing doctors, nurses and pharmacists – to do what we’re trained to do.
“We’re not being paid to enter data into a system. We can spend time with people talking to them, hearing about their world.”
