For a recent HTN Now webinar, we welcomed OX.DH founder John Kosobucki, who shared his insights into best practices around virtual consultations and user adoption, as well as using the national Microsoft tenant, and presenting case studies from OX.DH’s OX. waiting room component.
The webinar began with John outlining how OX.DH has spent a lot of time building up a relationship with NHS England and Microsoft, through the development of different frameworks. He noted how the completion of several implementations of the OX.DH platform has already helped with identifying certain “patterns and lessons learned”, which has allowed the organisation to adapt its approach. From these learnings, John goes on to explain best practices for virtual consultations and virtual waiting rooms.
Lord Darzi report: key takeaways
First, John highlighted some of OX.DH’s key takeaways from the Lord Darzi report, noting: “From our perspective it’s important that people are thinking about that intersection between technology and patient care and looking at how those two things can be married together to give the same type of digital experience that we’ve all grown accustomed to in other aspects of our lives.”
John also expressed a need to “understand there’s a risk if we don’t do anything” and that “things won’t get better and they continue to stagnate”. He went on to suggest that lessons could be learned from large corporations who are already managing staff and sensitive data “to a high degree” and although recognising that “the NHS is different” there are still some areas that “translate well directly into healthcare”.
What do patients and healthcare professionals want?
Next, John’s focus turned to the differences between patients and healthcare professionals in terms of what they want from a cloud-native solution. From talking with patients, he noted two requirements: “All they want is for it to be simple. Make it an intuitive, modern, easy way to interact with healthcare professionals. And they don’t want to be downloading an app. It should be click and go.”
However, John noted that the requirements are “more complex” for healthcare professionals as this covers everyone from IT, to administration and the people delivering the care. John gave a brief overview of the wants of these professionals: “It starts with making sure it’s intuitive, so it’s easy to adopt. They want to be able to see and engage with their patients with scheduled and ad hoc interactions. And it’s good to bring everything together in one place: video, online, face-to-face and phone consultations, even when that information might be spread across multiple pathways and EPRs.”
When speaking on what it takes to integrate these systems successfully, John highlighted how, “getting it right is super helpful but often people want to start with a very basic approach and then incrementally start adding in that integration as their broader ecosystem changes”. He noted the importance of making sure this was done in a “secure, scalable and cost effective” way because there can be “so many disjointed systems” within one organisation.
He also highlighted the recent publication of the NHS Cloud Strategy adoption plan. According to the document, a plan has been put in place to “help NHS and healthcare organisations get started with understanding how to adopt cloud solutions and what the impact will be on their server, infrastructure, and applications”.
The OX.waiting room component explained
One of these OX.DH deliverables is the OX.waiting room component which is a cloud-based solution that manages the patient workflow and can “integrate with existing paths, EPRs and even flat files”. John emphasised that one of the key considerations for implementing any solution of this kind is to “make sure it’s fit for purpose and accessible for people”. As such, OX.waiting room is based on Microsoft Teams, using code that “uses the exact same underlying infrastructure and surface information to create a familiar look and feel for everybody.”
John explained that anyone with an NHS.Net account can take OX.waiting room for a one month “free test drive”. He shared details on how to do this: “It’s installed on the national tenants app source. All you have to do is have one of your admins create a channel, go into the app source and load the Lobby and Admin tabs. Create a test patient or connect for PDS lookup, schedule a test appointment and then start a consultation to see how it works.”
Lessons learned from previous implementation
John took some questions from the audience. One focused on the lessons learned from the Barnsley Hospital case study in which they partnered with OX.DH to implement video consultations. John noted: “It was very quick getting something up and running to replace what they had. However, what took a lot of time was identifying all the different use cases for the existing systems that they had in place and making sure that they could coordinate and inform people about the transitions that were taking place.”
John and the team also learned that it was good to “identify opportunities to streamline and remove connections that were no longer necessary” and that from a security standpoint “there were many services that were allowing direct access without any patient verification”. John noted how patient verification was “one of the things that our clients have said they really appreciated having because they were often getting randoms queues of people that did not have appointments.”
How can organisations increase the usage of virtual consultations?
Finally, we asked John for his advice on increasing the usage of virtual consultations across healthcare and what some of the best practises were for achieving this. “It’s about making things as straightforward and natural to start using,” John said. “Some systems you have lengthy training material that are time consuming when you introduce those new systems. Ours is pretty straightforward. I log in based on my particular profile and then I see the appointments that I’ve been configured to see. It makes sense.”
We’d like to thank John for his time presenting this demo and sharing his insights.
