Automating common tasks across an acute trust
What problem was the trust looking to solve?
In January 2020 University Hospitals Southampton NHS Foundation Trust (UHS) started looking at Microsoft Teams as a platform for trust staff to securely communicate, collaborate and receive clinical information using a custom bot app developed by Medxnote. In February 2020 the trust started a pilot of 50 clinical staff in neurology to start using Teams to communicate as a department, and to receive their inpatient referrals. By mid-March 2020, it was clear with the huge changes being made across the trust that all staff would need Teams to enable staff to work from home, communicate easily to limit face to face contact, and to receive clinical information from wherever they were working.
What was the trust's response?
As a response to the pandemic, UHS secured 5,000 Teams licences and duly rolled the bot software out to a variety of staff groups. The development of an automatic process to assign licences to users enabled the trust to carry this out at speed. UHS also worked closely with its supplier Medxnote to ensure staff were able to:
- receive their referrals on Teams via the bot platform
- subscribe to receive results such as COVID-19 positive results for patients on their wards
- enable Teams users to contact a role rather than an individual in Teams, thus reducing the reliance on bleeps which don’t work for staff away from the hospital site
Without free licensing from Microsoft, without the expertise of in-house developers and without the support of Medxnote, the trust would not have been able to roll out this functionality at scale or speed.
What was the impact?
This approach has enabled the work at UHS to continue safely. It allowed thousands of staff to work from home effectively and has ensured clinical staff were able to work from private hospitals and still receive the information they needed. Clinical staff can act the moment a positive COVID-19 result is published, while patients are isolated or moved the moment their results are known.
What is planned next?
The trust is now looking at embedding Teams and Medxnote across the organisation – ensuring all staff realise the benefits of these systems rather than just those that needed it most. UHS is also looking at developing task management within Teams using Medxnote, making sure clinical staff have an active list of tasks directly related to the patients they are caring for. The UHS team are also enabling cross-tenancy communication so staff can speak to external colleagues across their region.