The winners of the first Beautiful Information innovation prize have been commended by the judging panel for the quality of their award entries which show the NHS at its best. Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust and Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust were announced as joint winners.
The six shortlisted entries were presented to the judging panel at the Innovation Warehouse in London. The judging panel comprised: Dr Marc Farr, founder, Beautiful Information; Jane Ollis, non-executive director, East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust; Simon Marshall, director of finance and information, Ashford St Peters Hospitals; Chris Farmer, consultant renal physician, East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust and Richard Ewins, head of information development, East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust and director of product development at Beautiful Information.
According to Dr Farr, the quality of the entries made it difficult to choose the winners. “We found it incredibly humbling to see shortlisted entrants come from each corner of the country to share their ideas and to reach out to us to possibly help them take the next step. We will continue to develop the prize each year and this year’s shortlisted applicants will be invited to join us in next year’s judging.”
The team from Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust has developed a real-time patient flow dashboard. This provides real-time ward and trust-wide information to improve patient
flow and transfers from inpatient beds. Teams can now teams to spot bottlenecks and try new ways of working and target improvement action to improve key metrics as displayed in the live dashboard.
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has developed an in-house digital system which replaced traditional white-boards on adult wards providing live, transparent and auditable information to facilitate nursing handover, RCP acute care toolkit compliant on-call handover for medical teams, board rounds, pre-populated e-discharges and e-AKI alerts. The system is accessible via any trust device and is integrated with diagnostic result systems, document management system and e-referrals.
Beautiful Information will now start to work with both teams to help them make the most of their innovations ensuring that staff and patients at each trust are able to benefit from them.
Dr Farr said: “We are investigating putting together a national showcase event later this year to encourage the spread of innovation we have seen and we will also be developing a series of written and online resources so that we can spread the word quickly.”
For media enquiries, or to arrange an interview with Dr Marc Farr, contact: Julian Tyndale-Biscoe, 07782 985597 email: julian.tb@inhealthcomms.com
Note to editors
- Beautiful Information is the first NHS/private partnership of its kind and provides unique real-time information to NHS trusts to help them plan and resource clinical services to meet hourly fluctuations in patient demand. It is based in the information directorate at East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust.