Trusts buy iBleep Hybrid system

Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and Stockport NHS Foundation Trust have signed a deal with iBleep to implement its latest interactive web based messaging system.

The Hybrid system provides on-call doctors with critical patient information that is gathered from hospital ward nurses via a wireless or mobile network.

It allows the nurses to send free text and patient observations, including heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation, and assign a green, amber or red colour to the call according to its urgency.

The observations are then converted into an early warning score and algorithms linked to the colour of the call allow clinicians to prioritise it.

The company worked with the District General Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand to design and enhance the product.

The hospital has since introduced specialist roles such as clinical nurse advisor so that the calls go directly to the correct person, allowing doctors to spend more time with their patients.

Denise Manning, daily operations manager at the hospital, said: “After 200,000 iBleep calls it has become a way of life, doctors and nurses appreciate the increased efficiency it has brought.

"iBleep improves patient care as it better enables prioritisation of calls about sicker patients.”

Although iBleep has been used in trusts across the UK for a number of years, these are the first deals for the Hybrid system, which combines GPRS and wireless into one system as well as providing configurable observation outputs by speciality.

Roy Walters, managing director of iBleep, said: “The first deployments of our Hybrid model have been a huge success. Hybrid intuitively knows whether a doctor is using a WiFi enabled PDA or smartphone via the mobile telecoms networks.

“It is also uses specialty-based reason codes and algorithms that allow EWS, MEWS (modified early warning score) and PEWS (pediatric early warning score) scores to be recorded and is a fully configurable 24hr solution adaptable to all working models.”

The trusts will both go live with the system later this month.