Sirona care and health has transformed how wound care is managed in the community, by harnessing the power of AI and has been recognised by the Nursing Times for its work.
Wound management makes up a fifth of all community nursing caseload. It’s an extremely complex area and could include surgical wounds, pressure ulcers, leg ulcers, trauma and diabetic foot wounds. Identifying when wounds have stopped progressing in their healing is incredibly difficult. The national wound care strategy recognised this as a massive problem costing £billions.
Sirona has transformed its wound care by partnering with Healthy IO to implement cutting edge technology delivered by its nurses’ smart phones paired with personalised health interventions. The technology can identify wounds that are deteriorating allowing Tissue Viability Nurses (TVNs) to optimise treatment plans.
The Minuteful for Wound app used by Sirona features a built in AI solution that is better than the human eye at identifying wounds that are deteriorating. It flags them on to a dashboard which is checked daily by Sirona TVNs to identify those patients who need additional treatment allowing nurses to review and optimise their treatment plans. This allows for better outcomes for people – with median times to heal halving during the roll out.
In addition to the much-improved patient experience shorter heal times and the associated related impact on health and wellbeing such as pain, reduced mobility, psychological impact and overall wellbeing the embracing of digital tools has led to a decrease in administration– clinical assessment notes time has been cut by half. We anticipate a reduction in unplanned wound associated hospital admissions from complications associated with wounds such as infection.
The project was shortlisted by Nursing Times for Technology and Data in Nursing and Stacey Griffiths, a Tissue Viability Clinical Nurse Specialist, was shortlisted as Nurse of the Year.
Sue Murphy Clinical and Operational Lead for Tissue Viability, Lymphoedema and Dermatology said “We trained over 500 people in the space of three months to allow us to roll this out across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire. Without the buy in and relentless hard work of the workforce and clinicians on the ground these remarkable results just wouldn’t have happened.”
Alison Dark, Associate Director: South Gloucestershire and Programme SRO for Minuteful for Wound Implementation added “We worked really closely with the app developers, Healthy IO, to ensure the app does everything we need, they were super responsive to our asks which I think improved the app overall as well as providing what we need for our patients which is improved outcomes for all”
