Bringing Streams to Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

We’re excited to announce that we’ve agreed a five year partnership with Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. We’ll be providing them with Streams, our secure mobile app that helps nurses and doctors access important clinical information and get the right care to the right patient as quickly as possible.

This will be our fourth Streams partnership, following on from our work with Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.

Doctors and nurses at Yeovil will be able to use Streams for a range of functions, including vital signs observations - entering information such as heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate and temperature into the app, and making that information instantly available to other Streams users involved in caring for that patient. These types of vital signs are used by clinicians to identify the earliest signs of patient deterioration from many serious conditions like sepsis.

The Trust will also be able to use Streams to enable clinicians to view blood and other test results on their mobile phones, so they can check results at the patient’s bedside or from anywhere in the hospital, without having to log on to a computer. The app will also in time generate alerts for patients at risk of deterioration from conditions such as acute kidney injury and provide a range of teamwork and collaboration tools across devices and operating systems.

Having quick and secure access to important patient information in this way has already proved popular with Streams users elsewhere, with some nurses saying that the app saves them up to two hours each day. While Streams doesn’t currently use AI technology, we hope that it will help to accelerate the pace of innovation in NHS IT and make it possible for more advanced services to be introduced in future, subject to strict regulation and oversight.

Dr Tony Smith, Consultant Anaesthetist and Chief Clinical Information Officer at the Trust, said:

“Technology has an increasingly important role to play in the way our hospital provides care, which goes far beyond the move from paper to digital records.

“We are therefore very pleased to be working with DeepMind; a company at the forefront of the application of digital technologies and better use of data to improve healthcare.

“The Streams application will enhance the expertise and experience of our clinicians, by processing and presenting existing data, applied to existing NHS algorithms, in more accessible and more responsive ways. The results will be quicker, more informed clinical decisions and better outcomes for patients.

“Everything about our partnership with DeepMind and the products we implement is about improving our ability to care for the patient. The information that will enable the Streams application to work and support staff to make vital decisions about treatment and care is data that is already collected and held by our hospital, and remains under our control. It will be used for no other purpose than to inform the delivery of care to our patients, in the same way as existing observations and patient record products in use in our hospital.

“Describing how data will be used will form a central element of the forthcoming engagement which will happen with patients, the public and staff in the coming weeks and months.”

Dr Dominic King, clinician lead at DeepMind, said: “We are really pleased to be working with the team at Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. They want to use health technologies in a way that benefits patients and the doctors and nurses who care for them. This is a goal we share, and it’s the reason why we built Streams. By putting together all the information a clinician needs, we think Streams can reduce the time nurses and doctors currently spend on administrative tasks. This should help them make quicker and better decisions about the right care for patients. It’s a tool I wish I’d had when I worked as a doctor in the NHS.

“We’re also looking forward to working with the Trust to talk to patients and the public about our partnership, and hearing from them what they think about how these types of technology should be used in care.”

In line with our commitment to transparency in our work with the NHS, we are publishing our legal agreement with Yeovil, and Yeovil has published the Privacy Impact Assessment, so that patients and the public can see exactly what we’ll be doing for the Trust. As with all our partnerships with the NHS, the Trust will remain in full control of all patient data at all times, and DeepMind will only process data according to the strict instructions of the Trust and in accordance with our contract. No patient data has yet been processed by DeepMind, and we expect this work to begin in 2018.

All our work is done with patients and their needs at its heart. Patient privacy and confidentiality are paramount, and we’re fully committed to ensuring patients are aware of our work with each of our NHS partners. We’ll be working with the Trust on their plans to make sure that patients know about and have the opportunity to ask questions about Streams, before the Trust instructs us to start processing patient data. A programme of patient and public events, information notices and communication will be hosted across the Trust, providing opportunities to find out more about Streams.

It’s a real privilege to be working with the NHS to help patients and clinicians, and we’re proud to be working with yet another outstanding Trust team to help improve the lives of patients, nurses and doctors.