David Wolfson

Digitisation of patient monitoring

Digitisation of health data is beneficial for individuals (they get better treatment) and the population (improved health and effiencies), and is a stated aim of the NHS long-term plan. While implementing new technology (e.g. connecting patient monitoring to wifi) is an obvious step for this, there is as significant estate of un-connected devices in use (e.g. 220,000 BP monitors distributed to peoples homes in 2020). The aim of this project would be to bridge the transition to connected monitoring, but providing tools to digitise that data.

However, both these tools require accurate human transposition of the data.

aims:

create an app to capture BP reading from a patient monitor (home, primary or secondary care) using vision and push this directly to an EHR?

benefits:

• reduce transposition errors
• increase uptake of home monitoring
• enable digitisation of data from existing estate (est. as hundreds-of-thousands) of un-connected monitors already in hospitals, clinics and peoples homes...

feasibility:

• In 2021 a paper was published that demonstrated proof of concept that smartphone technolgy can be used to automate this transposition (the code available via the BPimageTranscribe github repo).
• Florence (or Flo) is text message based system for home blood pressure reporting (Ian McNicoll also told me about this), and there has been a specific NHS initiative on Home monitoring of blood pressure(BP) Does this flow directly to an EHR, or could a workflow be created to do so?
• the NHS App has the facility for home reporting of BP, but it is burried extremely deep. How can the usability of this be improved for increased uptake? note: BP also forms part of the news2 parameters. Could these be usefully put into an app? Some of these are subjective, so digitising their definition might be useful. It'd take significant validation though.