CONNECTPlus: Digitally supporting patients across multiple care pathways
Health Tech Awards 2022 Winning Entry: Digital Pathway & Workflow Optimisation
Introduction:
A patient engagement and co-design event at Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust found that while patients are in favour of using apps to manage their health, if they live with more than one condition, having separate apps for each condition that "don't talk to one another" becomes more of a burden than a benefit.
Equally, it is not realistic for a hospital to provide an individual app for every specialty or procedure.
As a result, and due to the growing cases of multi-morbidity nationally, HCI worked closely with patients and clinical teams to develop CONNECTPlus; a tool that provides 24/7 access to clinically assured information, FAQs, and symptom tracking for multiple conditions and pathways, all in one place.
Hospitals using CONNECTPlus can add as many or few pathways to the app as required, giving patients with multiple conditions, or undergoing different surgical interventions, one place to find everything they need about their care.
About CONNECTPlus:
Features include:
- Condition specific information (video and text)
- Symptom and health score trackers
- Appointment and medication reminders
- FAQs
- Meet the team
- Clinic locations and contact details
- Links to local and national sources of information
Content can easily be tailored to fit local needs and the ability to personalise the app with a Trust’s logo, department contact details, team members and multiple clinic locations, ensures that patients know it’s an integrated, trusted part of the service supporting them.
A three-phase approach to set up enables individual specialties to get up and running quickly with ready made, high quality patient education but also allows for steady development and spread at Trust and ICS level to become a unique, whole system digital health solution.
CONNECTPlus comes with an intuitive clinician dashboard that gives healthcare professionals access to valuable data that can provide insight into rehabilitation, disease progression and trends in demand. This data can be shared and viewed by the patient and their clinical teams, enabling clinician/patient initiated follow up, admission avoidance, removal of unnecessary appointments and improved efficiencies in multiple pathways, conditions or procedures.
CONNECTPlus also has the ability to integrate with EPR systems, other digital health providers and medical devices making it a comprehensive, and connected ‘digital front door’ for any health system.
HCI offers full setup and implementation support including the creation of new condition specific content, staff training, patient communication resources (eg. wallet sized signposting/reminder cards, leaflets and posters) and onboarding guides, all housed in a supporting client resource hub.
The Impact (so far)
Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of CONNECTPlus is ongoing and in early stages, but impressive results have already been seen.
The Rheumatology department at Torbay and South Devon NHS where CONNECTPlus was initially co-designed and piloted have:
- Reduced calls to their department helpline from 70 to 40 calls a day (due to patients finding the answers to their questions in the FAQ section of the app)
- Reduced waiting times to start new medication from 3 weeks to 1 week
- Removed ALL face to face appointments for one medication clinic (thanks to delivering patient education and information through the app)
- Saved 12 hours nursing time each week (due to the app content being used to facilitate video led group education clinics. This equates to an annual staff efficiency saving of £19,292)
This has helped their patients get their medication earlier, meaning they are more likely to go into remission earlier, suffer less joint damage and have less pain and problems. Patients surveyed report a 9/10 satisfaction rate and have provided extremely positive comments including:
“I believe this app is a tool for empowerment. It is actually something that encourages you to be resilient, it gives you the tools to work with and notice some progress for yourself and think yea, I can do this, I can cope.” Valerie, patient
As well as reduced calls to helplines, reduction in waiting times and fewer face to face appointments, other benefits include:
- Better informed patients
- Improved condition self-management
- Better structure and flow to clinics (NHS staff report that they are better able to manage the structure and flow of clinics because they know that the patients coming into the clinic are better-informed and really do need to be there)
- Support to implement PIFU pathways
- Avoidance of travel to hospital (saving time and money and supporting sustainability goals)
- Support to work through the patient backlog (by prioritising patients waiting for treatment and reducing wait times) and meet national targets in the NHS Long Term Plan, such as a 30% reduction in outpatient appointments.
What’s next?
CONNECTPlus currently supports over 50 conditions and 60+ interactive symptom trackers but more conditions and health tracking tools are in development. HCI continues to work with patients and clinicians to add features that encourage continued use and also address health equity.
Alongside the continued involvement of patients with every new condition that gets added to the app, HCI will use a Knowledge Transfer Partnership/University of Exeter programme in behaviour change to engage with patients on what functionalities are required that will help them to want to improve their health. HCI are also building towards CONNECTPlus users being able to create an account on CONNECTPlus using their NHS app login.
HCI’s long term aim is to use the data shared by patients to plan for and predict patient care within an acute hospital system and across an ICS to manage population health and longer term, using AI to make predictions in health. They are also exploring with academic institutions, as part of the Set Squared programme, how data can be used to support research into co-morbidities and the predisposition of one condition’s effect on another and how it could be prevented.
Improved patient experience, reduced need for face to face contact and increased capacity for staff is of enormous benefit to the quality of care and outcomes, but also financially for the sustainability of the health system. HCI aims to scale these benefits; helping deliver more care for more patients closer to home to enable clinical systems to tackle the growing challenges, and implement the goals set out in the NHS Long Term Plan.
