St John develops digital handover service

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PICTURE: A St John paramedic uses the ePRF 

eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

St John has developed a web service to allow a digital handover of patients from ambulance paramedics to emergency department staff.

St John ICT business analyst David Bainbridge says the ambulance service is looking for a district health board to pilot the online tool.

St John went live with an electronic Patient Report Form system in October 2015, allowing frontline staff to enter patient details into a structured electronic form using a tablet device, rather than having to handwrite notes.

The ePRF is currently printed off in EDs and presented as an Ambulance Care Summary.

Using the new web service, hospital staff could use a patient’s National Health Index number to view the ePRF online and potentially pull it into their own clinical system.

“We will be providing a CDA (HL7 Clinical Document Architecture) document so the data fields themselves are available and the DHBs can do what they like with it,” Bainbridge explains.

“It’s the actual data not just a picture of the data, so if they wanted to track a patient’s blood pressure from when they were at home to when they were discharged by the paramedics, they can.”

He says making the handover process digital would save time, as paramedics could simply submit the form electronically then go.

Patient safety would also be improved by removing paper from the system as paper can be lost and only viewed in one location, and transcription errors can occur when information is re-entered into hospital systems.

Bainbridge adds that a major clinical benefit is that hospital staff can see all previous ePRFs for the patient, as often a patient may have been seen by paramedics in the days or weeks before being transferred to hospital.

“It means that if [St John paramedics] see someone on Tuesday and leave them at home, then see them again on Wednesday and this time take them to a local clinic, then on Thursday they end up in ED, hospital staff will be able to see all of that,” he says.

“At the moment they would only know about the current call-out, so this gives them a fuller picture.”

Bainbridge has been in discussions with some DHBs about trialling the technology, but St John is still looking for a pilot site.

“For hospitals that want to do it, it means having to change their handover processes,” he explains.

“It has to integrate into the DHBs’ workflow and every one of them is different. But it must be driven by the DHBs, it’s very much up to them.”

If you are interested in learning more about trialling this technology, contact Bainbridge.