When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, we knew that our healthcare customers would be facing immense pressure and that it would be crucial for clinicians to quickly identify COVID-19 patients and easily capture and share relevant information. 

Leveraging Evolve's flexible eForms and workflow capability, we were able to rapidly create new forms and adapt our existing clinical forms to capture new COVID-19 information and statuses. This, in turn, facilitated the creation of new COVID-19 specific patient alerts to be dynamically generated as clinicians enter or update patient-specific clinical information. 

This means that clinicians have access to the most accurate and up to date information for each patient immediately after every handover, without the need for manual intervention. This update also ensures that once the patient has tested negative or is discharged the alert is automatically removed from their record.

Key benefits of COVID-19 alerts:

1. Improved patient outcomes.

2. Likely to aid with reducing transmission rates in the hospital environment for both patients and medical professionals.

3. Supports contact tracing activities.

4. Provides current statistics on the disease prevalence in the clinical setting.

Being able to add features like the automated COVID-19 alert has ensured that all clinicians working with patients with COVID-19 are quickly and clearly alerted to the condition of the patient. With Evolve providing access to the most up to date information at the point of care without any additional administrative burden, this allows clinicians' time to be used how it should be - helping to tackle the pandemic and treat seriously ill patients.  

Evolve is also helping to minimise cross-contamination within hospitals. With medical records being digitised and easily accessed across each hospital there is no longer the need for physical notes to be handled multiple times and moved around - extremely beneficial when dealing with a pandemic.  

Alongside helping customers adapt rapidly to COVID-19 related challenges, Evolve has helped improve information sharing and collaboration across systems and care teams. It has helped improve the efficiency of clinicians and supports better decision-making as information is available instantly at the point of care. Evolve helps customers take a giant leap towards paperless working and supports the request for access to real-time digital information, as laid out in the UK Government's 2020 Personalised Health and Care Agenda. 

In addition to helping our healthcare customers tackle COVID-19 challenges using Evolve at Trust level, we have also been helping at a national level, working with NHS Digital on initiatives such as the deployment of the online isolation note service and the NHS App. To learn more about how we are working with our partners in healthcare and the public sector to tackle the pandemic head-on, click here.