EmailKirklees Community Healthcare Services has calculated that its introduction of 600 Panasonic Toughbooks for community healthcare staff will save it between £9m and £10m a year from the third year of the project onwards. It reckons at least £4m of this will come from cashable savings.
The calculations, worked out with the project's provider BT, include just over £3m from saving clinicians travel time, £1.85m from avoiding unnecessary admissions and £1.64m from avoiding unnecessary referrals.
Tina Quinn, clinical and operational lead at Kirklees, told the SmartHealthcare.com Mobile and Wireless Healthcare conference in Birmingham on 24 February 2010 that saving money had not been the priority: "When we originally did the business case, it was around patient safety and patient care." Other benefits include improved productivity and better staff communications.
However, she added that the decision was taken more than a year ago, when there was more money available, and that financial savings have moved up the agenda.
John Wilson, a consultant gastroenterologist at NHS Fife, told the event that use of mobile technology can reduce medical errors, both improving efficiency and producing better outcomes for patients. This could include use of RFID tracking tags for the likes of sponges, to ensure they are not left inside patients during an operation, and for staff, to keep track of who took part in a procedure, something currently done manually. "Perhaps it would need to stretch out as far as golf courses" to track consultants, he joked.
He added that greater use of videoconferencing for telemedicine should be particularly beneficial for conditions that require "pattern recognition" for diagnosis, such as dermatology and rheumatology, with telediagnosis allowing radiology and other screening, such as of bowel samples, to be carried out by specialists at a remote location.
Wilson also thought that patients with chronic conditions including coronary heart disease, diabetes, respiratory conditions and mental health problems could benefit from remote monitoring, reducing the number of emergency admissions.
However, he warned that clinicians could be resistant to changes, and needed to be engaged to make such projects work. "I'd suggest a good place to start is one on one, not in a group," he said. "Start with their problems, not your solutions."
If an enthusiast can be persuaded to adopt the new technology and make it work to his or her advantage, "a combination of peer pressure and envy will do the rest for you," Wilson added.
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