Ascom

Ascom is a global solutions provider focused on improving communication for today’s healthcare workforce and COVID-19 environments with healthcare ICT and mobile workflow solutions.

We provide award-winning solutions used by NHS acute and mental health trusts, secure establishments and care homes. Our technology maximises staff efficiencies and patient experience, along with improving staff and patient safety all encompassed in one infrastructure and platform. Our solutions are used by over 120 NHS and private hospitals, and care homes, to improve staff efficiency, patient experience and staff safety.

Ascom’s Digistat solution unifies situational awareness, communication and timely actions to improve patient outcomes.

Optimising emergency care with integrated clinical systems and medical device monitoring

There are many challenges in urgent and emergency care in order to transform patient pathways:

• Management of a broad spectrum of acuity in patients seeking treatment
• Lack of visibility of clinical information
• Inter-disciplinary communication
• Covid-19 environments

Patient Diversity

Many different patients attend emergency departments every day. Some need little or no treatment. Some are in active resuscitation. Most are somewhere in between but could improve or deteriorate over time. Resources are stretched so that not every patient can be given a bed and be placed on continuous monitoring in order to identify potential deterioration. Therefore patients are typically checked sporadically which can either lead to missed deteriorations or to lack of suitable data to discharge the patient.

Wearables – By placing wireless monitoring devices on patients which can continuously monitor basic vitals signs and applying clinical decision support software hospitals can ensure that those patients who are on a downward trend are identified early and intervention is made before acute deterioration sets in whilst patients who are stable or improving can be discharged safely and potentially monitored further outside of the hospital.

Lack of visibility of patient investigation results

Due to the high throughput of patients and unknown conditions there can be high volumes of lab tests carried out in emergency departments every day. In many departments much time is wasted logging into clinical systems to find out if test results are back and if they point to further action.

With clinical system integrations, notifications can be sent to nurses or doctors when results are available saving time spent checking and ensuring that urgent interventions are actioned as soon as possible.

With integrated clinical systems and medical device monitoring, clinical decision support software can combine lab results with vital parameters to identify specific indicators such as sepsis or AKI. This can be seen in Ascom’s work with NHS Wales for a critical care information system.

Read more here https://www.ascom.com/uk/news/local-news/uk-news/ascom-wins-all-wales-nhs-intensive-care-contract-worth-13m/

Improvements with joined-up comms

Finally a major bottleneck in urgent care occurs when it is difficult to coordinate multi-disciplinary care around a patient. With purpose built clinical communications tools it is possible to communicate across multiple teams centered on a patient with instant messaging and voice communication.

Our future view for you!

Using existing technologies in a more holistic digital framework can lead to further gains in the management of patients seeking urgent care.

Integration of primary care, ambulance services and acute hospital systems could lead to the implementation of remote monitoring systems supplied by GPs or paramedics. This gives hospitals early visibility of vital parameters before a patient arrives and potentially avoiding admission altogether.