Organisation Overview
• Name of Organisation: Sheffield Teaching Hospitals (NHS)
• Type of Healthcare Setting: Hospital
• Department/Team Using Eolas: Critical care
What were the primary challenges your team faced before using Eolas?
They surveyed rotational staff about challenges accessing critical care guidelines – 11 respondents who represented a broad range of grades and experience in working in critical care highlight a number of issues with slow internet, not knowing the search term to find guidelines, too many guidelines not specific to their needs and internal systems crashing.
How was the process of onboarding and implementing Eolas within your team?
The team reported "Fairly smooth – uploading resources was very quick and intuitive for admins" - onboarding users was done via departmental induction, analytics data on Eolas was useful for monitoring usage.
The team saw immediate benefits within one rotation (i.e <4 months).
Has Eolas improved your team’s efficiency?
"Yes – less time wasted searching for guidelines (we timed rotational staff finding 5 specific guidelines using the conventional method (via the Trust Intranet) vs Eolas; the mean time saved using Eolas was 60 seconds per guideline."
This is almost 9 times (8.77) fast than current systems. The team at STH produced the results below, when clinicians searched for specific clinical guidelines:
Total failure rate to find guidelines was 11% on the intranet and 0% on Eolas.
In particular, the out of hospital cardiac arrest guideline, arguably the single most urgent clinical scenario in medicine, there was an over 27% failure rate for finding this guideline. Amongst the 11 staff members they timed to find 5 guidelines via Intranet vs Eolas, there were 6 instances of staff being unable to find a specific guideline using the Intranet (they gave up or timed out after 5 minutes), whereas there were 0 instances of staff being unable to find a specific guideline via Eolas.
"Eolas has made it quicker and easier to access guidelines, therefore the assumption is that clinicians are more likely to utilise guidelines, therefore care will be more aligned to the evidence-based practices advised in guidelines."
Quantitative feedback received (out of 5)
Eolas has improved team efficiency: 4
Eolas has made it easier to access information: 5
Eolas has positively impacted guideline adherence: 3 (unsure – we have not measured this outcome but we assume that Eolas will improve guideline adherence as it has made access easier).
Eolas has enhanced patient care: 3 (unsure – we have not measured this outcome)
Eolas has increased staff satisfaction: 5
"I have used Eolas as both an admin and user. As an admin it is very intuitive and easy to use/navigate around. I found it easy to upload material, to “tag”material with useful information such as expiry dates and key search terms, to customise the content to the department’s needs, and to access analytics data.This is far more accessible and interactive than the STH system which is controlled by the IT department and we have little input as clinicians. This allows us to be responsive to feedback and alter the app content whereas there is minimal scope for modifications to the Trust Intranet system. As a user, the Eolas app (as shown from our surveys and time tests) provides quick and user-friendly access to essential critical care guidelines. It allows for remote access, offline access and mobile phone access – this is extremely useful as we often work in environments where there are insufficient desktops for the number of staff needing a desktop, internet connectivity issues, etc. and the app allows us to get around some of these issues."
Discussion
Although the numbers are very low here, with only 11 people being surveyed and run in this trial, the results are very stark. In particular, the fact that there was an over 27% failure rate for finding the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest guideline, i.e., arguably the single most urgent scenario in medicine, is simply unacceptable. This should be considered a never event.
This case study perfectly highlights how internal hospital intranet systems are not fit for purpose for allowing clinicians to access clinical knowledge and clinical guidelines rapidly and easily at the point of care.
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