Somerset NHS Foundation Trust launches COVID-19 assessment and reporting service across trust to support the rapid response to COVID-19

Especially during the current COVID-19 crisis it is crucial for healthcare professionals to assess and access patient data quickly in order to deliver better patient care, reduce the burden on administration, and maintain consistency. In this way they can swiftly adapt to our changing understanding of the outbreak, and obtain the medical data for treating patients which is most useful for both the trust and others. Furthermore, the data-capture guidelines need to be consistently managed, expanded, and evolved as rapidly as the response.

Using a platform approach with a low-code form builder, together with clinicians Somerset NHS Foundation Trust has rapidly created, tailored, deployed, and improved the digital forms that integrate into its wider IT estate in less than three weeks.

With the help of clinicians, the agile form-building processes created solely by the Trust are producing new COVID-19 forms, which are being rolled out on a weekly basis.

The Trust has now gone live with the following tailor-made solutions, and more are to come:

• Critical Care Daily Assessment of COVID-19
• Ward Patient Summary
• Research of Suspected COVID-19 Assessment
• Post Discharge Outcomes

Better’s products – Better Platform, our own Form Builder, and OpenEHR – are supported by community work and by sharing the same data models and lessons learned from across Europe.