Wound Care App

So, I'm Ellie. I am a service manager for Luton District Nursing. And, oh, are you going to be able to do the slides for me? I can, yes.

Yeah, perfect. So let me introduce some of my team to you, which is slide two. So this is, it's about a third of my team. So these are the culprits that took on to the WoundCare app that we introduced. So, what happened was, we firstly completed a wound photograph audit.

So we were looking at the photograph quality and how often measurements were taken of wounds, just to see if there was actually a need for this.

When we were looking at this, we did discover that actually we didn't have a way of measuring the human cost of wounds.

So things like their pain, their distress, their anxiety, social isolation. If you've got a wound that you feel is ugly, smelly, et cetera, you tend to isolate yourself.

So we were looking at, we didn't have a way of recording those sort of pressures. We also kind of didn't have a way of recording any issues that kind of extenuated wound healing times. So, the chronic conditions that they had and things like that.

So we were trying to find a way of being able to identify these hard-to-heal wounds, the ones that we couldn't heal within the normal healing times, or is identified as the normal healing times, and how we could capture those quality of life.

So, when we first did this audit, we picked 30 patients that had had wounds for 12 weeks, and as you can see, we did an audit on how good the photos were and how often we were measuring them. And as you can see, there's quite varied results in there. So we didn't always use a ruler, so we didn't always get a true picture of how big these wounds were or how small they were on photographs.

So we decided that there was actually a need for a wound care app. So the reason we chose the one that we went for was because we had a look at, there was, I think there were 7 or 8 different ones. And I'm not very techie-minded. I am a nurse.

And we had to fill out questionnaires about what they did and how they did. One of the reasons why we chose, it's now called Precision Healthtech, it was Healthy IO, was because people had already used it. It was a proven product within healthcare. So it had been already picked by 15 other trusts, so we had some of the work already done.

It had already done the integration work within SystemOne. Most of the other apps were new to the country, didn't have any integration with SystemOne, so there would've been a lot of work involved. And we felt that it wasn't actually in our benefit to do some of that work.

These apps have been, literally one of the ones we were looking at was actually produced by the producers of the CGI within Lord of the Ring. No, Lord of- Lord of the Rings. It was Lord of the Rings, in New Zealand.

So they'd done all the CGI for that, and just realized that there was actually a use for that, and they could do the measurements and stuff for wounds.

However, none of that was integrated with SystemOne, so we decided not to. The company also offered us a really good training package, and there was AI in there to standardize the measurements of the wounds. The other thing the program did was it was able to identify the deteriorating and static wounds.

So this is something we had struggled to do within our own work. So that is the long and short of why we went to that product. And then, so the way we implemented it, behind the scenes, we did a lot of work within the coding. So obviously we had our coding within our templates on SystemOne, so we just worked together to get the ones that they'd already coded with other trusts and the ones that we had coded. We had to make sure that all our staff had the right mobile phones.

So it needed to be a smartphone of a certain age, so we had to do some work with that. We also had to give them the dressing formulary so that the dressing choices were right in there. And we also decided we'd make some questions compulsory.

When we were doing this, we decided that rather than going in a little bit at a time, we went in whole hog.

So all of our team were trained over the course of a week, minus those on annual leave, on sick, et cetera. And we decided that we were going to implement the change as every visit. So the WoundCare app was used at every visit now. Other trusts hadn't done that.

Some of them had done it for just RN reviews, but we felt that we should do it every visit. So we implemented that over the week. So yeah. And then what happened since we've implemented the WoundCare app? So we re-ran the audit that I'd run previously, before the audit. And as you can see, there is a vast improvement.

So the quality of the photographs that were taken, because of the use of the AI, and there's stickers involved to focus the cameras and standardized colours within it, the Quality of the photographs were much, much improved. If you'd have seen some of the ones previously compared to now, it was like day and night.

The portion of weeks that we had the photographs taken, obviously, we'd implemented it to be every week. It was only 12 that were needed. The accuracy of the photographs were much, much better. And, we also were able to identify healing factors, things that were going to stop the wounds from healing.

And as you can see from that little graph, the productivity within the team with regards to wound care has actually increased since the implementation. So that's from August to November of the year, and it just improved gradually throughout the year. So it was really good.

So where are we going now? So for the company, we are the train the trainers pilot site, so several of us have been trained up to give the training. We are looking at sharing up with care homes, and we are looking at our data dashboards within the app to see if we can get some better data coming out, more meaningful data. And our objectives for this year have been set with regards to some of the data that we can pull from that. There are quite a lot of other things going on as well because of the app.

So interestingly, I have been told this week that there is a, what we were just talking about, I forgot the posh term, the dictation.

So there is a dictation thing that we can get switched on within the app as well. So we might be looking at that. So I might need to link in with the previous presenter for that. But that is the long and short of it.