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CW Innovation: rapid advancement in remote care in response to COVID-19

03 February 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic created a need to innovate at pace and almost overnight, we have introduced a range of innovations, digital systems and platforms into our day-to-day functioning to help us continue to deliver safe, consistent and high-quality clinical care whilst helping to make things easier for our patients.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a need to innovate at pace and almost overnight, we have introduced a range of innovations, digital systems and platforms into our day-to-day functioning to help us continue to deliver safe, consistent and high-quality clinical care whilst helping to make things easier for our patients.

As part of the CW Innovation programme – jointly led by the Trust and CW+, the Trust’s charity – we have fast-tracked new digital systems to meet the increasingly varied ways in which we need to look after our patients and to reduce the need for them to come into our hospitals.

Our focus has been two-fold; improving how we connect to, and communicate with our patients; and ensuring we continue to provide excellent care even when we are unable to meet patients in-person.

We have introduced new technologies to:

  • Help patients to monitor and report symptoms from their own home, access their health records and book appointments online
  • Deliver care beyond the four walls of the hospital with virtual consultations, digital care plan apps, and novel sensor technologies that monitor unwell patients remotely.

Rob Hodgkiss, Deputy CEO & Chief Operating Officer at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust explains; “The rapid and transformative progress that has been achieved to date is monumental. Our CW Innovation projects have generated national recognition for the Trust in its role as an early-adopter and designer of next generation services and care tools. It’s important that we continue on this trajectory to support our patients and staff as their needs evolve as new challenges emerge from COVID-19.

“As an example, we’ve recently launched the new digital solutions: Klick, DBm-Health and Lumeon’s enhanced offerings, all in response to the pandemic to ensure we’re delivering high-quality, remote care to our patients in own their homes.”

Klick has been designed in collaboration with ViiV Healthcare to transform care for people with HIV. The Klick mobile app allows patients to manage appointments, complete health assessments, review results and communicate with their healthcare team from the comfort of their own home, while the clinician-facing technology facilitates swift assessment of patients’ needs, providing them with improved access to the most appropriate care.

DBm-Health is a remote support and management app for patients with diabetes that has been cocreated by diabetes clinicians at the Trust and Sensyne Health to enable patients to remotely monitor blood glucose levels while allowing clinicians to see their results, stay in regular contact with them and reduce the need to go into the hospital.

 The postnatal team has designed additional capabilities to the award-winning digital discharge solution codeveloped with Lumeon to provide new mothers with a digital postnatal discharge report. During the pandemic, mums and their babies are leaving hospital more quickly and are also less likely to have face-to-face contact with their community midwives or health visitors, so the new technology ensures that everyone caring for them has all the relevant information relating to ongoing postnatal care and concerns.

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