Birmingham Community Healthcare Foundation Trust rolls out remote patient monitoring to care homes across East Birmingham

Birmingham Community Healthcare Foundation Trust (BCHC) is rolling out the Docobo Remote Patient Monitoring platform to care homes across East Birmingham with excellent feedback and reported benefits to patients and colleagues alike. So far, the Trust has rolled out to over 16 care homes and will be rolling out further across Birmingham and Solihull in coming months. Care homes are reporting reductions in unnecessary hospital visits for residents.  

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. Care homes use the remote monitoring kit to monitor residents and readings are sent to the East Locality Hub where a team of multi-disciplinary clinicians review and triage patients and agree the next steps.

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 Residential Care Home in Acocks Green is one of the care homes that has been using patient monitoring across the home to improve the quality of care for its residents.  It uses the Docobo Remote Monitoring platform to update personal healthcare data, which is then recorded by the care home team and submitted to clinicians using a secure web interface to the East Locality Hub where clinicians monitor it.

Alex Keegan, Manager at Arden Lodge says:

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. A recent example was when three of our residents became unwell. 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 our care and are now fully recovered.

Shannie Jennings, East Locality Hub Manager said:

We have a strong stakeholder engagement programme underway, and 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.

The project continues with rolling out to further care homes across the region.