Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust - Case Study
The Access Group, with Rio EPR, is operating in partnership with WoundMatrix to improve patient care at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust.
We are bridging the gap between our electronic patient record and a specialist injury assessment tool, ensuring the most accurate patient records, better care management, and the most appropriate treatment.
The Access Group provides Rio EPR to Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust and has now partnered with WoundMatrix Inc., specialists in the development of digital systems supporting wound assessment and care, to improve the quality of healthcare provided by the Trust.
By partnering, APIs have been developed to link the two software solutions together. This ensures rapid, accurate sharing of patient information and allows clinicians to make better decisions quicker.
Introduction
Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT) provides NHS services to the community; primarily in Kent but also to parts of East Sussex and London as well. As part of the modernisation of these services, the Trust onboarded Rio EPR – our electronic patient records solution – back in February 2020 to help improve the accuracy of patient notes and enable clinicians to make better observations, which in turn helps them make better care decisions.
The Trust is also partnered with American firm WoundMatrix Incorporated, whose software provides a highly detailed checklist and image upload to give a meticulous report about an injury site. WoundMatrix allows clinicians to state the team they are in, to describe the wound bed (site of the injury), as well as to highlight other important details such as change over time and what dressings were used and when. It also allows for multiple unique wound instances per patient.
The Access Group and Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust have been partnered via Rio EPR for a little over three years now, and the Trust is also six years into a 10 year contract with WoundMatrix. Both solutions are incredibly important to them, but they lacked one key feature – integration. The Trust was noticing at best half of clinical staff properly using WoundMatrix because of time constraints and a priority commitment to filling in details within Rio EPR.
We were getting a very poor uptake of WoundMatrix as a direct result of that because people were just recording basic notes in Rio.
But now that we’ve got the integration in place… this has changed the whole ball game for us.
People are starting to catch on to this and realise that they can easily go between systems and information flows between them.
How Access helped
At Access we strive to support our customers so that they can provide the best care possible. We are proud to be able to partner with other healthcare solutions providers to do this as we believe that joined-up healthcare is the strongest approach to modern healthcare.
The Access Group is partnered with WoundMatrix Inc., enabling integration between their wound software and our Rio EPR. This partnership allows our software developers to team up and explore the software coding and develop an API to link the two tools together.
Access developed a simple, embedded button (pictured below) to sit on the Rio EPR dashboard
This embed changes colour depending on whether a patient is registered within WoundMatrix. The green above means yes, they are registered.
Yellow means they are in Rio EPR but not yet in WM, and red (below) means their NHS number has not been found in the electronic patient records at all.
This integration enables information sharing, but also encourages greater usage of the wound software. Today’s healthcare needs flexible solutions - something Access recognises and strives to help with.
Here Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust has a niche aid that is being paid for and under-utilised; an expense they need to commit to but can’t afford to waste.
I’m quite confident that it’s going to make a big difference to the way the users perceive filling in the WoundMatrix application now!
The Result
As a result of our partnership with WoundMatrix, Rio EPR now contains an easy-to-use embed button to open a new tab up for WoundMatrix and an individual’s specific records.
In the words of the Trust: “There was poor uptake because of the duplication of effort. They’ve got 10 or 15 minutes to see a patient in their own home. They haven’t got time to be logging out of this and into that and putting all the demographics in again and so on.”
Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust has since seen a marked increase in clinicians utilising the wound software, with Eldon Macarthur - Head of IT Systems and Business Change at KCHFT – pointing at a significant increase in staff engagement with the tool.
Patient statistics and trends are still too early to report on since the introduction of the changes to Rio EPR, but we hope to be able to provide those (positive) figures here in the future.