Funded by Innovate UK, Bitjam partnered with a large hospital trust, and three innovative health technology companies to deliver ‘Smart with your Heart’.
The £1.2 million project at University Hospitals of North Midlands (UHNM) is enabling heart failure patients to better care for themselves and prevent readmissions into the hospital.
With the support of community staff at Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (MPFT), 300 patients are piloting 3 digital health technologies:
Florence is a telehealth SMS service powered by Bitjams software and Simple telehealth’s methodology. It enables patients to respond to text messages asking how they are feeling compared to their last text message – same, better or worse, or ask how they are against a professionally designed symptom checker. Information is collated by the telehealth co-ordinator and circulated to clinicians if necessary.
Recap Health is an online health library holding videos and information tailored to patients’ needs and condition, aiding self-managed care.
The final tool in the box of these heart failure patients is i-Navigator . A social prescribing tool, where patients can be easily referred to link workers from a range of local health and public service agencies. Self-referral is encouraged.
In an age where smartphones have become instruments for creating monumental change for individuals, social groups, cultures and communities around the globe. It is estimated that this project alone could lead to 24,000 fewer hospital admissions in the region, 240,000 fewer bed days and save the NHS £60m.
Alongside our work with the partners of the project we were delighted to be able to facilitate their data analysis with a purpose-built dashboard for all data to be processed, integrating with UHNM’s Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) system.
Our dashboard imports data from the HES system, community services provided by MPFT and the 3 digital technologies partners.
Future additions to the service will be data from GP surgeries in the area, which will be a groundbreaking achievement, to bring together primary and secondary healthcare data.
The dashboard’s aim is to see in real-time how the service is doing, and if it is meeting its Key Performance indicators (KPIs). In essence, it allows clinicians and management the ability to see how many patients are signed up and using the system and of those patients how many have been able to manage their condition in the community and prevent readmittance into hospital.
The data will be academically evaluated by two participating universities, Staffordshire University and University of East Anglia. They will have access to anonymised data to perform their analysis. Once full data analysis has taken place, then a full report will be published for public view.
This project has been a great challenge which all the team at Bitjam has really enjoyed developing. We have worked hard with UHNM to ensure this is a robust system and feel it is a big achievement.
The image below is exclusively for demonstration purposes and is NOT a reflection of current project data.