Hicom supports best practice in patient care and auditability combined with data security and compliance
Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust (BWC NHS Trust) has been working with Hicom’s paediatric diabetes management software-as-a-service solution, Twinkle, to underpin its care for children and young people with diabetes. The Trust’s whole multidisciplinary team, which comprises over 30 users including administrative staff, consultants, nurses and dieticians, has been relying on Twinkle for the care of over 400 paediatric patients per annum, since 2012.
Twinkle has supported BWC NHS Trust in providing optimal patient care by allowing information to be available to its multidisciplinary clinical teams at the point of care. In addition, Twinkle has made it easier and quicker for the team to measure performance and collate the information required for the National Paediatric Diabetes Audit (NPDA) and the Best Practice Tariff (BPT).
According to recent research by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), the number of young people being treated for diabetes continues to increase. In 2019, there were an estimated 36,000 children in the UK with diabetes under the age of 19, up from 31,500 in 2015. This places both greater emphasis on clinical teams to provide the best possible patient care while also managing increased reporting requirements, including care processes (healthcare checks) and outcomes, as well as hospital admission data, to help measure the health outcomes and experiences of children with diabetes.
BWC NHS Trust entrusts Hicom’s Twinkle to streamline the clinical management of paediatric diabetes patients by providing a single source of up-to-date data for each of the Trust’s patients, as well as giving access to information in a format that is easy to extract for audit. In addition to clinical drivers, Twinkle also ensures that the Trust complies with the latest data security and protection requirements around the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) annual assessment.
Marie McElroy, Assistant Service Manager, Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, comments: “In recent years, diabetes treatment has moved on incredibly quickly, as has the technology that our patients use. In all the time we have been working with Hicom, they’ve always kept Twinkle up to the minute with those developments; adding new technologies and features and removing elements that have become redundant.
“In addition, it’s undoubtedly the single most up to date reporting system we have for our patients and has proven invaluable for us in how we ensure high quality care for our patients and their families.”
Indeed, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Twinkle played a significant role in facilitating the Trust’s transition to virtual clinics and ensuring continuity of care for patients outside of the hospital setting by adding in secure video connections and secure, remote access. In addition, from a reporting perspective, by amending the way in which blood results were recorded within a patient record outside of a clinic appointment, Twinkle was able to ensure BWC NHS Trust’s NPDA and BPT data remained up to date and compliant.
Marie continues: “Twinkle is immensely intuitive and easy to use; whether it’s a consultant, a nurse or one of the admin team within a patient record, Hicom has made it so that, as a user, you’re immediately presented with what each patient needs and what we as a Trust need. It’s eliminated the need for our users to run reports every time and manually identify what data we need from an audit perspective, which means that it’s given us more time to focus on the provision of care for our patients – which has proven hugely important in recent years, and will continue to be as the NHS contends with the shockwaves of the COVID pandemic.”
Marie also speaks very highly of the support network Hicom offers its clients in the form of its Twinkle user groups. “It can be a bit daunting when you first start working with a new system,” she says. “Even though Twinkle is very user-friendly, it’s nice to have a forum where you feel comfortable to ask questions. In addition, the events are really insightful because of the wide scope of users participating and sharing how they use it differently; they’re great for getting tips and sharing even better ways of working.
“I can honestly say that I don’t know how we would cope without Twinkle as a Trust,” she concludes.