The delivery of health services is a complex task at the best of times, but it’s fair to say 2020 has been anything but that. Covid-19 has put unparalleled pressure on all aspects of healthcare provision, with the most vulnerable in our society often experiencing the greatest impact.
Supporting mental health awareness and developing solutions to support those working to improve patient outcomes in mental health is something we are passionate about at earthware.
Long before the Covid-19 pandemic, we have been working to support Otsuka Health Solutions (OHS) in the development of the Management and Supervision Tool (MaST). The decision support tool is currently used by three mental health trusts in England to support decisions about care across community mental health teams, identifying people who may be at greatest risk of using crisis services, improving patient flow and highlighting upcoming care reviews.
Soon after the outbreak began, OHS identified an opportunity to develop an adapted version of MaST, so that staff at Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust could identify, intervene and ensure the safety of their most vulnerable service users, assessing whether a change in care would be needed during this turbulent time.
By triangulating data and presenting the information in an intuitive way from a range of sources, healthcare professionals could make better informed, faster decisions and respond quickly, and appropriately, to the needs of service users.
Supporting OHS, who were working in collaboration with Mersey Care NHS Trust and funded by a grant from Innovate UK, we created a Covid-19 version of MaST, a dashboard bringing together patient data from a range of sources for the first time. In just two weeks, a prototype version of the dashboard was available, and the fully functional dashboard was launched soon after.
“In its first six weeks, MaST Covid-19 helped a team of 50 clinicians to contact and assess more than 7,000 patients, and to prioritise and deliver care to the most vulnerable.” said Caroline Gadd, Director at OHS, “Without the dashboard in place, health trust staff would have spent valuable time searching for and piecing together care records manually, delaying delivery of urgent mental health services.”
This week, MaST Covid-19 was Highly Commended in the 'Most Promising Pilot' category at the HTN Awards, recognising the dashboard’s impact. We’re very proud to have been part of a dynamic team creating award-winning technology to support clinicians, and ultimately their patients, take on the mental healthcare challenges presented by the pandemic.
You can read more about the delivery and impact of this project in this article by Caroline Gadd.
To find out more about the MaST-Covid dashboard visit the website.
Please note that the screenshot displayed includes representative patient data and is for demonstration purposes only. All names and personal information are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased) is intended or should be inferred.
