Challenge
How to manage and clinically supervise large volumes of covid patients safely at home.
Solution
Adaption of existing Virtual Ward model to provide remote monitoring of patients in their own homes using an oximeter with results monitored by PHL clinicians based in PHL’s 24/7 nationwide call centre.
Benefits
Hospital admissions were reserved for the critically ill, while patients have the comforting reassurance of clinical monitoring in their own homes.
Outcome
Clinical monitoring of a large volume of patients to correctly identify the patients who need urgent admission to hospital based on silent hypoxia enabling interventions at the right time. The knock-on effect prevented unnecessary admissions which would affect hospital capacity.
PHL’S COVID Oximetry at Home (CO@H) service delivers remote monitoring of patients with Coronavirus symptoms. Patients used an oximeter to monitor their oxygen saturation, which were submitted to PHL clinicians and reviewed three times a day to assess if patients require further treatment or admission to hospital.
PHL was ideally positioned to deliver this service having extensive experience of remote patient monitoring using our dedicated clinical team, who are available 24/7, using technology to enable care provision.
Covid patients were referred to the CO@H service if they developed respiratory problems but did not require immediate admission to hospital. PHL staff at the Whiteley call centre took patients through a series of triage questions and a PHL driver delivered the oximeter device to their home. An oximeter measures how much light is absorbed by blood and calculates how much oxygen the lood contains. An oximeter is a quick, non-invasive and completely painless test, which patients can easily administer on themselves.
Coronavirus attacks the lungs causing lungs to stop providing oxygen to the bloodstream resulting in ‘silent hypoxia’, a condition when oxygen levels in the body are abnormally low, which can initially present no symptoms and can irreparably damage vital organs if gone undetected for too long.
Patients sent their blood oxygen readings via text messaging three times a day to the PHL team and were proactively called by the clinical team to check how they were doing. If readings showed signs of deterioration, PHL staff triggered a pathway for patients to be either contacted by a Clinician, seen at a local Covid clinic, or transported by ambulance to hospital for life saving treatment.
Whilst other monitoring centres close at 10 pm, PHL’s Whitely team operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week providing a firstclass service to the NHS and comforting reassurance for often fearful
and scared Covid patients. In a patient survey, 100% of patients using the oximeter with PHL monitoring found PHL’s service helpful and would recommend PHL.
At its peak, PHL received between 10 to 15 referrals a day from GPs admitting covid patients to be on to PHL’s virtual ward, and between two to five ambulances a day transported patients to hospital for life-saving treatment. The virtual ward had a rolling capacity of 150 patients with the potential to rapidly increase if needed.
The service developed to accommodate more complex cases seen with the Covid variants and has evolved to manage patients who are discharged from hospital, all of which helps to free up even more hospital beds and valuable resources for the critically ill.
