It’s now seven months since the first UK lockdown which marked the escalation in concerns and response to COVID-19.  At Ortus-iHealth we take a few moments to reflect upon some of our achievements over this period and prepare ourselves as we head into this year’s flu season.

COVID-19 pandemic presented an exogenous shock to the our model of care to which the NHS responded in haste.  If there is a silver-lining in the events of the over the past six months, it is NHS’s demonstration of response to a crisis.  Delivery of health-care was forced to transform itself to be more virtual in nature, accelerating a multi-year technological transformation to a matter of weeks.  At Ortus, we are very proud to have aided the NHS in its response.

Achievements we are most proud of:

1. Created COVID-19 starter packs, including Patient Template Information sheets, ‘How-to’ YouTube clips for both patients and clinicians to fast-track training and adoption.
2. Introduced an SMS-based Patient Registration Process
3. Digitised St Bartholomew’s Hospital’s AMI pathway, transforming Heart Attack outpatient care, reducing appointment cancellation rates and reducing the time between discharge and the first follow-up appointment from 3 months to 8 weeks.
4. Optimise the AMI pathway to reduce discharge time from 3-5 days to 1-2 days  post Heart Attack, creating ‘more’ hospital beds for COVID-19 patients.
5. Working closely with our Tech-partners, we brought forward our plans, implementation and delivery of our Batch Onboard Process, our Virtual Ward and Virtual Monitoring Systems
6. Created and digitised the Gastro Intestinal Cancer pathway at St Bartholomew’s Hospital within an afternoon, including creation of PROMs, staff training and using the recently developed Batch Onboarding Process system we managed all the appointment re-scheduling, booking and communications with patients and clinicians, all within an afternoon
7. Most importantly, we are most proud of contributing to the ‘New Norm’.