Objectives of the service
CliniTouch Vie creates an accessible virtual clinic providing monitoring of chronic disease management and education to patients, all within a mobile device and all at home, using video conferencing and messaging. Clinicians are provided with real-time visibility of their most at-risk patients through an enhanced system that provides advanced warning of when a patient’s condition is likely to deteriorate by vital signs monitoring and poor air quality - enabling prompt pre-emptive interventions from the patient and the healthcare practitioner.
Users and their needs
CliniTouch Vie is a flexible, real-time remote monitoring solution that is integrated into a live clinical setting across sectors to provide personalised digital solutions that empower patients and improve clinical outcomes. It provides the digital leverage to enable patients to take a more active role in their own health and care while creating capacity to increase workforce productivity to meet rising demands.
- Reduce hospital admissions – through real time management of high-risk patients preventing admissions
- Deliver workload efficiencies – support better patient self-management, reduce the need for direct interventions and enable staff to focus on priority patient care
- Support early discharge – provide hospital level diagnostics and monitoring in the home enabling early discharge and remote clinical support post-surgery or in care-home settings
- Enhance care for patients with chronic conditions – Inform, empower and engage patients as part of NHS prevention agenda
- Offer locality wide cost savings – improve outcomes across multi-disciplinary teams
- Provision of accurate, location-based satellite air quality data enhancing care provision and patient self-management options.
The CliniTouch Vie clinician user interface displaying RAG (red, amber, green) alerts:
The CliniTouch Vie patient user interface:
A 98-year-old patient using CliniTouch Vie:
Service/ system concept
CliniTouch Vie is providing fast, simple and easy to use satellite air quality data to the digital remote monitoring system. This information is helping patients make health care decisions, such as, ‘The air quality is so poor today I will stay at home and close my windows’. Through real time monitoring, health care management and meaningful education to patients such as ‘How to get the most out of your inhaler treatment’ or ‘Exercise for COPD patients to take outside when the air quality is good’, clinicians have an unprecedented real-time visibility of their most at-risk patients. These patients are being managed at home, are feeling empowered and more confident about their health care management and are avoiding the revolving door of hospital admissions.
Clinicians are using video conferencing to manage and support patients.
Patient and clinicians are using health trends to keep track of their biometric readings which include blood pressure, pulse and oxygen saturations.
Space Added Value
A number of Earth Observation data provides inputs for the provision of the service. For instance:
- Data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) is used for a range of species including NO2, O3, PM2.5 and PM10. These inputs are critical to informing surface concentrations of key pollutants.
- Direct L3 NO2 data from Sentinel 5P enhances regional import estimates within the air quality modelling.
- Meteorological data (EUMETSAT via ECMWF) contributes vital wind vector information to enable pollution dispersion to be accurately calculated
- A satellite-enhanced digital elevation model is used to provide surface feature information (including buildings and trees)
- GNSS data is used for location tracking for both patients and mobile air quality sensors, and provides tailored position-based information on pollution concentrations
Earthsense Mappair video https://youtu.be/B1SoBO9pA-o
Current Status
Following a successful pilot deployment, Spirit Digital’s CliniTouch Vie has concluded the project to rebuild the CliniTouch Vie platform incorporating air quality data, provided by partners EarthSense. This is allowing patients to be informed of the quality of the air in their immediate neighbourhood and make decisions about their daily activities through informative education.
Patient and Clinician Feedback from the Pilot Study:
Clinicians also have a view of their patients air quality and can map this to other biometric measurements helping to build a picture of their patients condition. The ultimate goal being to support and empower patients at their place of residence, intervene where necessary and help prevent a hospital admission.
Clinicians have become increasingly interested on how they can use air quality data alongside other patient reported biometrics. Air Quality is reported alongside the patient’s question sets and clinicians are using this data to look at correlations in decline and the quality of air in a patient’s locality.
Clinical Nurse Specialist Sarah Hughes said, “I find air quality data helpful in informing my assessment of patients' symptomatic status. With chronic conditions such as heart failure and COPD, patients can report a variable symptom burden and awareness of environmental factors affecting this can aid the assessment process and inform patient counselling to reduce anxiety.”
Alongside air quality information patients and clinicians can video conference, view health trends, patients can receive messages from their clinicians, access education and advice and feel secure in the knowledge that their health questions are being monitored and triaged by their clinical team.
Since the Pilot conclusion, Spirit Digital has been able to secure a commercial contract and has now developed several pathways of care which include:
- A Covid 19 Discharge
- A Care Home/ Frailty Pathway
- A Pulmonary Rehabilitation Pathway
Introduction to CliniTouch Vie by Spirit Digital can be watched by following the link: https://vimeo.com/504736693
Prime Contractor(s)
Subcontractor(s)
