Luscii-powered LNWH virtual wards nominated for HSJ Digital Award

London North West University Healthcare Trust (LNWH) has been named in the HSJ Awards for its digitally enabled virtual ward programme.

The trust has used Luscii as a single solution to develop several virtual wards and innovative digital pathways.

The team will find out if it will become HSJ’s Digital Innovator of the Year at an awards ceremony on June 22 in Manchester.

Virtual wards are a cost-effective solution to delivering effective healthcare closer to home whilst tackling ever increasing in-patients demands, but providers have often struggled to implement them.

LNWH selected Luscii as its delivery partner, with the trust building its virtual wards on their powerful, digital-first platform to build a successful virtual ward programme.

Shrawan Sharma, Senior Transformation Lead in LNWH’s Transformation Team, said: “We have deployed Luscii as a single solution across all pathways.

“Patients can stay connected to clinicians through the purpose-built Luscii mobile app.

“Using a single solution has provided usability to care for patients with multiple health needs.

“For example, we can support patients with respiratory, heart failure and infection with intravenous antibiotics needs with one single solution and a multi-disciplinary specialist input.

“They can access services and technical support 24/7, with clinical experts providing clinical review, face to face intervention, and rapid escalation, as required.

“Many of our pathways are now stretching across the ICS, and we have started working on our plans to link with community and primary care to build a whole system integrated pathway.”

Luscii provides the Trust with critical data in real-time, enabling them to make effective decisions to manage patient care optimise resources.

Its co-designed platform provides a safe, stable, and secure process to undertake clinical reviews efficiently.

It’s also highly scalable, said Shrawan.

Currently, the virtual ward cares for 120 patients across five pathways, and the trust has ambitions to increase this to 200 “beds” by the end of the year.

Patients only get onto the VW if they need repeated clinical reviews and would otherwise be in hospital but are clinically stable.

This ensures the Trust makes the most effective use of its virtual ward capacity.

The results are impressive.

Shrawan said: “In our virtual ward cohort, we’ve reduced hospital admissions among heart failure patients by 70 per cent, whilst reducing length of stay by around 8 days in a pre-post evaluation and achieving optimisation in 70 per cent of our cohort as opposed to national benchmarking of 49 per cent.”

The LNWH team faces tough competition to be named HSJ Digital Innovator of the Year.

They’ll find out if they’re successful at a black-tie award ceremony on June 22.

Chris Malone, Luscii’s Managing Director UK, said: “This partnership rapidly started to deliver results, enabling the LNWH teams to confidently replicate the delivery model to additional long-term condition programmes.

“It has been a pleasure working with the members of this trust to truly transform their digital offering resulting in the creation of one of the most innovative and impactful virtual services in the country.”

More information about virtual wards with Luscii