Virgin Care made a significant investment in a new mobile healthcare solution to tackle the issues they were facing. As with many healthcare providers, the major challenges within community nursing were around the historic ways in which the services were operating. This included a heavy reliance on paper records and old IT systems. This meant that community nurses input data on multiple occasions which took up valuable time that could have been spent delivering care to patients. The paper based process also meant that there was a higher possibility of error or loss of records, affecting patient safety.
This solution was Totalmobile.
Totalmobile provided Virgin Care with a complete mobile healthcare solution that eliminated paperwork, supporting clinicians’ normal way of working and providing real time information at the point of patient care. All clinicians were provided with Totalmobile on mobile tablets, which enabled them to improve the management of their entire role.
Totalmobile made an immediate impact on service delivery, and within 6 weeks of the project going live, Virgin Care had already achieved their initial goals and given clinicians the freedom to focus on delivering care. On average, clinicians experienced a 30% increase in the amount of time that they spend with patients each day. This has provided them with enough time to undertake 2 additional patient visits, per nurse, per day. Clinicians have also seen a 60% reduction in time spent on administration and a 30% decrease in travel time as they no longer have to make regular, unnecessary trips to base.
Virgin Care are also experiencing enhancements being made to their clinical records and referral handling, with a 60% improvement in clinical record time and a 42% improvement in referral handling and scheduling. There has also been an increase in the safety of care as all patient data is accurately and securely captured and stored as one up to date electronic record, which is then available to other clinicians.
Marie Cummings, Programme Manager at Virgin Care says “I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved. I have no doubt that this will change the way community services are delivered, more importantly providing a better patient experience. I believe the opportunities are endless. Not only has this enabled nurses to spend more time with patients, it has significantly improved the efficiency of the service and reduced clinical risk.”
Virgin Care plan to continue to review the progress of the mobile healthcare solution as they aim to maximise and demonstrate the benefits in terms of health outcomes for patients, cost savings for the public and staff satisfaction. They also plan to explore further possible functionalities within Totalmobile, with a long term goal of rolling out the solution to other community services nationwide.
