Improve patient care through remote monitoring

The pandemic placed a huge pressure on hospital capacity resulting in the rapid uptake of remote monitoring solutions to help keep patients safe at home.

The Discover-NOW Diabetes Exemplar team, a cross functional collaboration between Discover-NOW, AstraZeneca and NHS colleagues, is focused on digital pathway re-design and remote monitoring for patients with T2DM.

During COVID-19 NHSx reached out to the team for support with the national remote monitoring response. This was as a direct result of Discover-NOW’s collaboration in building digital remote monitoring solutions for patients with T2DM.  Team members seconded to the national response and were able to support clinical outcomes through expertise and use of our Discover high-quality near-time data.

In collaboration with NHSx, working alongside clinicians and using the remote monitoring service by ‘HUMA’ (another partner of Discover-NOW), the team were able to digitally enhance clinical practice through ‘Community virtual hubs’. These hubs enabled clinicians to rapidly identify deteriorating patients, react quickly, avoid further complications and better manage system capacity and improve overall survival rates.

The team deployed this model of working in both primary and secondary care and patient reported data from the HUMA app was flowed into the depersonalised Discover data. This meant that the data is available for health data research and allows these new cutting-edge pathways to evaluated for safety and effectiveness.

The Discover-NOW collaborative and NHSx team led, what is believed to be, one of the fastest ever implementations of a digital service in the NHS – going live in four weeks.

Within two weeks from launch on 24 April 2021, at the peak of COVID-19 in London, there were over 150+ patients on the Community virtual hubs with 96% of patients using the app daily as prescribed. The technology and implementation was inclusive; the oldest user was 80 years old. The team estimate the service increased secondary care efficiency by 500% based on Health Care Providers making over 150 calls to patients per day which reduced to 30 calls per day using remote monitoring.

Several thousand patients have to date have been discharged from the pathway. Channel 4 recently reported on the service.

Using the learnings from the COVID-19 remote monitoring programme the Discover-NOW Examplar team will be deploying two additional remote monitoring projects looking at High risk diabetic patients (in primary care) and heart failure patients (in the outpatient setting).

The Discover Data is being used to baseline current clinical practice and show the impact of newly designed care delivery pathways to demonstrate improvements to the system.

Both projects will help the NHS in north west London better support their patients and improve patient experience through transforming care pathways to avoid disease deterioration and driving efficiency.