Project to monitor young patients at home

Ground-breaking project to monitor young patients at home wins funding from NHSX: The Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and Isansys Lifecare have won funding from NHS England’s Transformation Directorate (formally NHSX) to create a hospital from home for acutely unwell children.

Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, Liverpool, UK, has successfully trialled the state-of-the-art Patient Status Engine (PSE), a wireless patient monitoring system developed by Isansys, and in collaboration with Alder Hey Innovation Centre and the Community Division, this funding will scale this trial to monitor children at home.

The technology allows clinicians at the hospital to monitor young patients at home as if they were in hospital, providing the patients’ vital signs continuously at a central monitoring station or on mobile devices 24 hours a day and ultimately integrating this key data into the electronic medical record system. With this information clinicians and community care teams can work seamlessly together to provide personalised care plans for the young patients at home, eliminating the stress and disruption of admission, or readmission, to the hospital.

Simon Minford, ANP and Innovation Consultant, at the Alder Hey, said: “Management of the acutely unwell Complex Paediatric patient is challenging, and can often culminate in a stay in a High Dependency environment. This causes significant disruption and distress to families and children and can bring them significant distances away from their family and support networks to get the care they need. Bringing enhanced care closer to home with remote vital sign monitoring aims to provide clinical teams with more information earlier in the course of disease, to enable earlier decisions on treatment which can hopefully avoid deterioration by ‘nipping it in the bud’. By enhancing the care of these complex children, we can also avoid potentially lengthy stays in an HDU environment which has significant benefits to the paediatric critical care system.”

Keith Errey, CEO of Isansys, based in Oxfordshire, said: “We are delighted to be working with the inspirational people at the Alder Hey as the technology partner to support home monitoring of acutely unwell children. We know that delivering digital health solutions to support patients and improve outcomes is a focus of many NHS organisations across the country. This funding helps to unblock the barriers to the implementation of these projects and demonstrates the technology’s ability to enhance patient care and support front-line staff.”

The Digital Health Partnership Awards focus on how digital products and services can support people to remotely monitor their health at home or in the community. NHS organisations are able to bid for funding to accelerate new and ready to scale digital health technologies.

The first phase of successful applications were awarded in October 2021. The second phase of successful applications were announced earlier this week. The Alder Hey NHS Foundation Trust were awarded three Digital Health Partnership Awards in collaboration with Isansys, Objectivity Ltd and Isla Care.