Embracing Digital Technologies to Optimise Care – Delivering Digital Culture, Cost and Benefits’

Doing things differently at GOSH

Historically, healthcare estates have faced entrenched barriers to incorporating digital technologies. These include poor WIFI, out-of-date systems and insufficient funding.

Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) is a world-leading children’s hospital, committed to pioneering breakthroughs in cancer care and treatment with the help of digital technologies. The GOSH redevelopment team are in the process of building a new Children’s Cancer Centre (CCC), which will use digital tools and methods to further transform children’s cancer care. These include:

Bedside digital accessibility – enabling patient connectivity with the outside world

An integrated Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system, streamlining the patient pathway

A new digital hospital school, leveraging first-class connectively to minimise gaps in education and feelings of isolation

Digital apps – using augmented reality (AR) to help children plan their patient journey, reducing anxiety pre-arrival and whilst on site

Digital wayfinding – using AR to aid patients’ journeys throughout the estate.

New digital diagnostic facilities – improved diagnostics, less invasive procedures and reduced length of stay.

While hugely beneficial to patients, implementing digital technologies can present estates and facilities management (EFM) professionals with several challenges:

Understanding and use – Many healthcare professionals do not have a technical background, and may not feel comfortable using digital technologies – let alone leading on their implementation, maintaining them and explaining them to others

Implementation in a live care setting – This places additional pressure on EFM teams to get new technologies up and running and staff members educated on their use

This presentation explains how GOSH is overcoming these challenges by:

Developing in-depth training – All EFM professionals are continually trained on digital tools and are themselves training other healthcare team members, helping to embed knowledge; and

Planning – EFM teams implement digital technology in a live care setting, creating a seamless transition from the existing estate into new facilities