SortED receives a grant from Innovate at Imperial – Jun 2020

We now have funding for our next trial of the SortED app in both an Emergency Department and an Urgent Care Centre.

 

Imperial Health Charity recently launched this new grants scheme. It aims to provide opportunities for Trust staff to explore novel and innovative ways of improving health care, hospital processes, patient safety and/or patient care.

 

The early prototype trial published in International Emergency Nursing is on-line now
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ienj.2020.100875

 

Since that trial we have made several improvements and have added new components:-

• Improved acuity setting recommendations
• A new pain evaluation system and analgesia prescription selection
• A new Urgent Care Centre streaming advice tool.
• Sepsis alert system
• Updated investigations and treatments recommendations

This trial will test these new features and study the impact of replacing the traditional serial process where triage is followed by ~40 minute delay before investigations are ordered. The SortED process combines triage, assessment, investigation ordering and treatment selection. A pit-stop start to the patients’ journeys in ED.

 

The UCC streaming tool guides the user to select the best facility for patient treatment (within the UCC or elsewhere in ambulatory care or ED). We observed in our UCC trial that ordering investigations was minimal at streaming. It was followed by a long wait, median 68 minutes (interquartile range 33-118) before the second consultation began and investigations were ordered. X-rays were ordered at >180minutes from arrival.

 

We are having to delay the start of the project because of lockdown, but hope to be able to start in October.

 

Gillie Francis – Jun 2020