Arden Lodge Residential Care Home uses remote patient monitoring to enhance resident care and save time

Arden Lodge Residential Care Home in Acocks Green is using patient monitoring across the home to improve the quality of care for its residents – while avoiding unnecessary hospital visits for residents, freeing up hospital beds for those who might need them more and saving time for colleagues. 

Docobo Remote Patient Monitoring from Graphnet is being rolled out by the Birmingham Community Healthcare Foundation Trust (BCHC). So far, the Trust has rolled out to over 16 care homes across East Birmingham with excellent feedback and reported benefits to patients and colleagues alike. The team will be rolling out further across Birmingham and Solihull in coming months.   

The remote monitoring roll out is part of a Community Care Collaborative approach to improving intermediate care services across Birmingham and Solihull with a goal of avoiding unnecessary hospital admission for people, or - if they are admitted - to discharge them sooner with the support of the remote monitoring kit. 
BCHC is leading the Collaborative, which is a partnership between primary care, community health services, community mental health services, social care and the community and voluntary sector. 

Arden Lodge has around 40 residents and has a ‘good’ rating from CQC. 

The issue

The Arden Lodge team wanted to be able to keep poorly residents at the care home and review their care in order to save unnecessary trips into hospital which can cause problems for older people. 

The solution

The Arden Lodge team was invited by BCHC to join the remote monitoring programme and signed up for it. After a morning’s training on the digital system, they started using the Docobo Remote Monitoring solution.

How does remote monitoring work at Arden Lodge? 

Arden Lodge uses the Docobo Remote Monitoring platform from Graphnet to update personal healthcare data, which is then recorded by the care home team and submitted to clinicians using a secure web interface. 

• Care home staff take residents’ readings – such as blood pressure and blood oxygen, 
  record vital signs and symptoms onto the tablet (using thermometer, blood pressure monitor, pulse oximeter etc).
• Information is transferred to the care coordination centre at the new East Locality health and care Hub based in Washwood Heath.
• Care home staff can track information on the system.
• The care coordination centre team contacts the care home and respond to any requests or alerts within two hours and the alert is triaged.
• Baseline readings for residents can also be recorded monthly with a ‘Resident of the Day’ process. 

Alex Keegan is Manager at Arden Lodge and has overseen the deployment at the care home:

If we get readings that we are concerned about, we send an alert to the multi-disciplinary team at the Locality Hub. They contact us, usually within the hour, and together we triage the resident and agree the next steps. 

Benefits

Remote monitoring residents to receive speedier treatment and avoid unnecessary hospital visits, while it reduces wasted time for care staff waiting for a call to get through or waiting for a return call. 

A recent example was when three residents became unwell: two had confusion and one had cellulitis. The care coordination centre team arranged for the Urgent Community Response team to visit within two hours and involved our local GP and pharmacy too. All three were treated the same afternoon, remained in the care of the home and have now fully recovered.

Alex says:

The remote monitoring is really easy to use and has saved many of our residents from what can often be traumatic hospital visits and sometimes hospital admission. Using the equipment is easy and unintrusive for our residents. It also upskills our staff who are trained to take blood pressure, blood oxygen readings and how to observe symptoms.

The team recently used the remote monitoring kit three times in one day and were able to keep all three of its poorly residents in the comfort of their own surroundings.

Shannie Jennings, East Locality Hub Manager says:

We have a strong stakeholder engagement programme underway which includes contacting the care homes that are already on board weekly to make sure that they have everything they need, as well as continuing to accept new care homes on the programme. Studies have shown that this digital equipment is helping to reduce hospital admission from care home residents, and we know from our own records that this is being mirrored in the work we are doing.