Bristol Community Health CIC is now mobile
The first NHS provider to pilot TotalMobile App Platform goes live
Following on from a successful pilot, Bristol Community Health CIC has gone live with the TotalMobile App Platform across three of its community healthcare teams and the citywide phlebotomy service.
The TotalMobile App, a mobile workflow management solution, allows healthcare professionals to spend less time on administration and travel and more with patients.
Healthcare professionals within Bristol Community Health such as community matrons, district nurses, phlebotomists, and community nurses for older people are able to view patient demographic and clinical records, update patient information and record clinical activities at the point of patient contact by working with mobile devices such as tablets.
We wanted to become a more productive team, and to care more efficiently for the people we serve and we feel that we are making significant strides to achieving this goal
Hannah Burge, community nurse at Bristol Community Health said: “I love mobile working – I feel less stressed and more organised because I am able to do all documentation for that patient while I am with them before I move onto the next patient. This also means that my clinical documentation now is bound to be more accurate.”
Bristol Community Health is the provider of NHS-funded community healthcare in Bristol and its surrounding areas and has 30,000 interactions with patients every month. The TotalMobile App has been deployed to more than 60 clinicians for proof of concept during the pilot.
Amy Jones, community nurse, said that one of her patients was 'fascinated by the device, the ability to take a photo of his wound, and the opportunity for him to electronically sign to consent to treatment plans'.
She added: “The patient asked me questions about his care and I was able to access previous progress notes and other information by using the device while I was with him.”
Implementing the TotalMobile solution has enabled healthcare professionals to work more effectively and efficiently with patient information automatically updated at the point of care, therefore reducing duplicate data entries. Not only has this removed a very inefficient process of going to the patient’s home, filling in forms onsite, and then filling in the same forms at base, it means sharing information with other clinicians within the care pathway is much easier, more immediate and less time consuming.
To have our workers’ lives improved in this way has had an extremely positive impact all round; they are happier to come to work, staff workloads are more manageable as a result and we deliver a superior service to our patients
The TotalMobile App Platform draws information from the core clinical system which Bristol Community Health utilises to a mobile device, so that all the information pertaining to a patient can be viewed in a single screen.
Bristol Community Health has also been able to overcome challenges in connectivity as the solution allows staff to securely log in to the application offline for devices temporarily without a signal, access recent patient history and treatment plans, and clinical records, which automatically updates the core clinical system. Security of patient information is rigorous to ensure data is secure on the device, and also during transmission to back-office systems, so information such as an electronic patient record is never exposed, even if a device is lost.
Julia Clarke, chief executive at Bristol Community Health, said: “With the success we have achieved with the pilot in the initial stages, the only logical step for us was to go live with the TotalMobile App Platform across the remaining pilot teams within our organisation. We wanted to become a more productive team, and to care more efficiently for the people we serve and we feel that we are making significant strides to achieving this goal.
“We have been able to eliminate time-wasting journeys, therefore allowing staff to be more responsive, with the ability of 80% of staff leaving home and going straight to patient visits rather than coming into base. 100% of our staff involved in the initial pilot say they now feel less stressed and more satisfied at work. To have our workers’ lives improved in this way has had an extremely positive impact all round; they are happier to come to work, staff workloads are more manageable as a result and we deliver a superior service to our patients.”
