The collaboration between the two digital health-tech leaders delivers an end-to-end digital data capture platform that hospitals can use at every stage of each patient’s pre-operative pathway. Tori Dand, Head of Partnerships at Synopsis, explained: “When a patient has completed and submitted their digital pre-operative health questionnaire from home or on the go using Synopsis Home, the clinician can then stay within the same platform to send the patient the relevant consent information and digital consent forms to e-sign ahead of their operation.
“Actioning both these tasks within a single digital dashboard reduces workload for clinicians while also helping develop the use of digital informed consent where its use is appropriate.” She continued: “Synopsis and EIDO have collaborated in order to provide the NHS with a fully- integrated, best-of-breed digital pre-operative data gathering platform that is truly end-to-end. The time saved by pre-op teams using Synopsis iQ to capture pre-operative health and consent data digitally speeds up the pre-op pathway for each patient; something that is especially important as every NHS trust continues to manage and process the huge backlog of elective operations caused by the pandemic.”
Synopsis replaces the paper-based pre-operative administration process with a central digital dashboard used by hospital staff to access and manage each patient’s pre-operative pathway, including pre-operative health questionnaires conducted at home or in hospital.
Designed to capture data input from multi-disciplinary pre-op teams in hospital and for use by patients to submit their pre-operative questionnaire from home, Synopsis uses 250 tailored algorithms to generate published clinical scores including ASA and P-POSSUM to help to inform pre- surgery clinical decisions. Cardiac, lung and mortality risk levels are also calculated using a standardised process to generate individual risk assessments for every patient and ensure each is assessed without bias.
To date, the NHS trusts have used Synopsis to complete over 200,000 pre-operative assessments, with an average cost saving of £1.4million per Trust per year generated through a reduction of last- minute cancellations of surgery by an average of 20%, with further administration time reductions releasing nursing time back to pre-operative departments.
Phil Evans, Director of Partnerships at EIDO, said: 'Pre-op assessment and informed consent are usually treated as separate and distinct clinical admin tasks that are conducted routinely, but not always comprehensively covering what matters to the patient. In this first collaboration of its kind, EIDO Healthcare and Synopsis are bringing these two processes together, to create a unified pre- operative care pathway for patients awaiting surgery or invasive procedures.”
EIDO Healthcare provides a comprehensive range of digital consent solutions to help NHS trusts successfully manage and deliver informed consent. These solutions are in use across five continents in more than 1,000 hospitals, including 65% of acute NHS trusts in the UK. EIDO Healthcare supports more than 8,000,000 surgical consent decisions annually, helping health professionals achieve excellence in this vital area of patient care.
Mr Evans continued: “Many patients will have had a pre-op assessment, and provided informed consent, over a year ago. The great challenge which now faces hospitals is to administer these processes again without compromising the quality of patient care. Digitally transforming these tasks, whilst not a silver bullet, is a major step trusts can take to help ease the pressure on their teams as they continue to work through extensive waiting lists, which can help the NHS to regain control over waiting lists and ease the pressure on exhausted clinicians."
