Digital care home monitoring / telehealth in care homes Reducing non elective admissions with digital care home monitoring / telehealth in care homes

With the emergence of COVID-19, keeping vulnerable care home residents safe and well has never been such high priority. 

The digital care home service coordinates the monitoring of blood pressure, temperature, weight, heart rate, C02, Sp02 and risk of undernutrition. The service acts as an early warning system, highlighting changes in health.

The service can be accessed by health and social care staff through a desktop or by logging into the Inhealthcare Professional app. The data integrates into clinical systems, meaning it can be accessed by NHS teams remotely. Staff can input resident’s readings directly into the portal using the app offline, without the need for a WiFi connection.

The service can be used to intensively monitor patients discharged from hospital and data can be reviewed by NHS teams including an NHS 111 operator or a GP. Based on the information entered, care home staff can receive recommendations and guidance on next steps and alerts can be generated within triage dashboards for healthcare professionals to review.

The service allows for two way messaging and video consultations between healthcare professionals and provides care home staff with a vital lifeline and assurance on the health and wellbeing of their residents. 

Inhealthcare currently delivers digital health pathways to over 500 care homes across the UK including pathways used to monitor residents such as the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) and the unplanned triaging tools such as the Situation Background Assessment Recommendation (SBAR) pathway. 

Evaluations in Durham and Darlington of the SBAR pathway have provided the following results:

● 45% reduction in specialist nurse visits

● 18% reduction in overall unplanned admissions

● 13% reduction in out-of-hours unplanned admissions

● 24% reduction in in-hour unplanned admissions

Benefits of the digital care home service
Highlights early signs of deterioration

The service acts as an early warning system, highlighting any deterioration of health early. Using the digital care home service, Southern Health and Social Care Trust were able to increase monitoring of risk of undernutrition from once every 6 weeks to weekly.

Reduces non-elective admissions

The digital care home service increases compliance around care and enables timely intervention, reducing non-elective secondary care admissions.

Coordinates working between care homes and the NHS

Integration with clinical systems including SystmOne and EMIS Web improves coordination between the NHS and care homes allowing effective use of specialised community nursing teams.

Supports earlier hospital discharge and reduces delayed transfers of care

Clinicians are able to have the confidence that patients’ needs will be met within the care home, increasing capacity within hospitals.

The automated system offers great support to the dietitians and empowers the care home staff to take a more proactive approach to monitoring their increasing number of vulnerable residents. The residents and their families feel more supported too because the frequency of monitoring has been increased along with more timely reviews. To stop the service would be a backward step. We couldn’t go back to what we did before.

Mandy Gilmore, head of dietetics at Southern Health and Social Care Trust.
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    Interested in some of our other digital health services?
    National Early Warning Scores (NEWS)
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