Meet #OurEntrepreneurs – today we introduce Alexander Davey an ED Doctor and one of our Northern Ireland Cohort.
Tell us a bit about yourself
Hello my name is Sandy! I am an anaesthetist by training and intensivist by substantive appointment. With the COVID pandemic I have also become an ED doctor! I have been exploring innovation in digital health technology from an early point in my career. Following a successful project to demonstrate machine learning use in predicting patient deterioration I formed Digital Care Systems with an experienced data scientist. Our mission is to enhance patient outcomes with data-driven digital health technology solutions.
Name: Alexander Davey, NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Cohort 6
Occupation: ED and ICU Doctor
Why did you apply to the programme and what are you looking forward to?
I was aware of the clinical entrepreneur programme from an early stage but did not have a mechanism to apply at that point. There was an announcement on social media that HSCNI would be supported by InvestNI to facilitate participation. Having developed a taste for innovation with a few small projects I just knew that I had to go for it!
I’m looking forward to the chance to test and further develop my idea – eFluidChart. The opportunity to network and form collaborative relationships is critical to my vision for safer fluid management in general acute care settings.
Tell us about your innovation
We have developed a digital platform called eFluidChart. It improves patient care by optimising three key pillars of intravenous fluid management:
1) Clinical Skills: As a web-based electronic prescribing tool it can be used for simulation-based learning in competency development.
2) Clinical Governance: Analytics features facilitate both real-world and virtual rapid-cycle audit to provide useful metrics of clinical practice.
3) Clinical Decision Support: Using simulation we are able to rapidly iterate knowledge representation from clinical guidelines in a prototype system for deployment in clinical practice.
Intravenous fluid therapy in acute care settings is a big problem for the NHS. There are 23 million patients attending hospital in England each year with around a quarter receiving intravenous fluids. Up to one in five patients receiving intravenous fluid experience harm from suboptimal fluid management. Although incidents of very severe patient harm are rare, the volume of patients receiving intravenous fluids therapy during their acute care contributes to an iceberg problem in relation to harm from intravenous fluids. Organisations have been adopting a systems approach to fluid safety with some success, but there is still room for significant improvement with this persistent problem.
Our digital tool enhances the systems approach to managing intravenous fluid therapy and has potential to drive meaningful and measurable improvements to safety, quality, and efficiency of acute care.
In this next year I hope to establish a clear path to a collaborative network to pilot, with early adopter customers. This work will drive development of a best-in-class knowledge-based AI platform for deployment as a standalone system or within larger health information systems.
What motivates you?
I am passionate about improving the quality and safety of care using digital health technology. In recent years I have learned that developing and deploying effective digital solutions is a complex challenge and often falls short of delivering demonstrable improvements in outcomes.
This project will allow me to make a significant contribution to digital health by improving care and enhancing local networks for development of health technology. It will also allow me to establish an outcomes-based accountability approach to evaluation of technology in acute care.
For me, the most exciting aspect of this project is the potential for early project work using simulation to feed development of a more useful and useable decision support tool for real-world fluid management. No other organisation appears to be taking this approach to knowledge-based AI development for acute care.
How can we find out more?
To discuss how efluidchart could be used in your organisation please contact sandy@digitalcaresystems.com
TRANSFORMING HEALTHCARE THROUGH INNOVATION
