Developing an AI Digital Consent Pilot for Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust
From paper heavy, manual consent immunisation processes, to fully automated redesigned workflows and 5,000+ hours of potential administrative staff time savings per year
Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust needed to digitise the paper-based parental consent process used in school-age immunisations. The objectives were to alleviate the heavy admin workload the School Age Immunisation Service (SAIS) was burdened with, improve clinical safety, enable seamless integration with the Rio EPR and provide an effective reporting functionality at any point in time.
The EBO Solution was piloted to provide a quick, safe and easy-to-use digital tool for e-Consent for school children’s vaccinations prior to the sessions. The parental consent information is now provided through a natural 2-way conversation with an intelligent chatbot that integrates with the Rio EPR, collects Information and pushes it directly into electronic forms.
Key Interventions
- 1. Automated two-way conversation-based eConsent pathway
- 2. Workflow redesign delivering efficiency improvements
- 3. Administrative time released enabling more value-add activities
- 4. Seamless integration with Rio EPR
Benefits
8441
Consents / Year
96%
satisfaction rate / parents reported a positive experience during the pilot
2068
Hours/ Year of estimated admin time saved
The Starting Point
Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust provides a range of community-based health services for adults and children mainly in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin. The Immunisation Team offers school-based immunisation programmes commissioned by NHS England via all local schools. The process requires linking in with schools to assist with obtaining consent from the parent/guardian and collecting clinical information before each vaccination campaign.
Prior to the pilot deployment of the EBO solution, the team was using the Rio EPR as the clinical record. The consent process had not been digitised and as a result, was convoluted and paper heavy. Communication with schools was carried out by email, however printing of paper forms was required at various points in the process. School children were provided with a paper consent form to take back to their parent/guardian for completion. While information was being recorded into the Rio EPR, most of it was not structured data but was instead saved within a scanned form in pdf format. This made access to clinical information difficult. It is these inefficiencies that the Trust wanted to address.
Challenges of the Original Process
The process created a number of inefficiencies in both the consent and immunisation clinic workflows.
EBO automates school-age immunization consent for Shropshire NHS Foundation Trust
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Benefits of the Redesigned Workflow
The new workflow produced the following benefits:
Monitor & Action
Daily reports showing the return rate allowed the clinical team to monitor return rates, asking the schools to send reminders when required.
Environmental Impact
The reduction in printing and paper not only saves money, it also reduces the environmental impact
From Paper to Digital
The majority of completed forms did not need to be printed, scanned and uploaded into the system.
Improved Clinic Process
Consent form data was entered directly into Rio by the VA so the use of paper forms in clinic was greatly reduced. During clinic data was entered directly onto the Rio EPR so less time was spent scanning and uploading paper forms after clinic.
Multi-clinic Operation
Nurses were able to immediately add an outcome electronically to the clinic list keeping it up to date at all times, allowing multiple nurses to run multiple clinics concurrently for one school cohort.
Automated Triage
Screened the forms for potential clinical contraindications or queries reducing the number of forms requiring triage by a clinician during the pilot.
Clinical Safety
The availability of structured data allowed the local reports in the Rio EPR functionality to support clinical safety by identifying potential duplicate vaccinations planned based on clinical history.
Pilot Highlights
4988+
hours of potential administrative staff time released
96%
satisfied with their experience
Outcomes
Adoption
At the end of their conversations with the Chatbot, parents were asked to score their experience of using it to provide consent- related information to their Trust.
During the pilot, the EBO solution was received very well by parents with 97% of parents scoring their experience with a ‘like’ or ‘neutral’ score. Parent engagement is related to better health outcomes for children.
Automated vs Manual Uploads
Even though parents still had the option to use the paper forms and verbal consent methods the vast majority of parents in the pilot project used the intelligent Chatbot to return consent information
Patient Feedback
At the end of their conversations with the Chatbot, parents were asked to score their experience of using it to provide consent- related information to their Trust.
During the pilot, the EBO solution was received very well by parents with 97% of parents scoring their experience with a ‘like’ or ‘neutral’ score. Parent engagement is related to better health outcomes for children.
Conclusion
The pilot deployment of the EBO AI driven communications solution to manage eConsent was very successful in driving out business value for the immunisation service. The EBO solution has been adopted as the business-as-usual communications solution for the service.
Redesign of the end-to-end pathway created significant efficiencies over the previous semi-digital pathway and provided the data and integration required to fully automate processes across the entire pathway maximimising efficiency and return on investment.
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