What is a virtual ward?
A A virtual ward is a healthcare service model through which selected patients can be monitored and supported outside a conventional hospital ward. Care continues to be provided and governed by the responsible healthcare organisation.
The organisation determines which patients are eligible, which measurements are required, how frequently information is reviewed and what procedures should be followed if additional assessment or escalation is needed.
Supporting home-based monitoring with technology
Remote-monitoring platforms can receive information from connected medical devices and make it available to authorised healthcare professionals. Depending on the configured pathway, the service may also use questionnaires, video consultations, documentation and communication tools.
Technology does not replace clinical assessment or professional judgement. The availability of measurements also depends on correct sensor use, device operation, connectivity and system configuration.
BlueEye Virtual Wards
BlueEye supports virtual-ward workflows by receiving and presenting supported physiological measurements from compatible CE-marked sensors. Healthcare professionals can review current and historical measurements, patient-reported responses and associated information in BlueEye Hotdesk.
BlueEye may also support video communication, review documentation, workflow routing and non-life-critical review prompts where configured.
BlueEye does not predict or prevent medical emergencies, diagnose deterioration, recommend treatment or provide life-critical alarms. Clinical decisions and escalation remain the responsibility of the healthcare organisation.
The outcomes of a virtual-ward service depend on patient selection, pathway design, staffing, governance and local implementation.
How do virtual wards work?
Patients are referred into the virtual ward by healthcare professionals such as GPs, ambulance service, hospital teams and other specialist community services in the UK. Senior community nurses follow up the referral by assessing referred patients at home. For an elderly patient, the assessment would be discussed with the consultant geriatrician to establish if care at home on the virtual ward is suitable. This is followed by a discussion with the patient and their carers.
A consultant-led multidisciplinary team meeting review patients regularly after the patient is admitted to the virtual ward. The patient is supported in their home with daily monitoring, medication reviews, clinical observations and MDT reviews.
Benefits of Virtual Wards
Virtual wards can allow for admittance avoidance into the Emergency Department as well as supporting an earlier safe discharge of some patient cohorts from hospitals. The cohorts that are gaining momentum are frail/elderly and respiratory patients but many more cohorts can be explored for suitability.
Virtual wards can relieve the pressure on hospital resources and facilitate shared responsibility of care with the community healthcare services. It means patients can be in the comfort of their own homes while recovering, secure in the knowledge that they are being monitored and cared for.
Increasing physical bed numbers requires capital investment in buildings. Decision making is slow and building the resources is slow. Virtual wards can be set up more easily with a fraction of the capital costs.
“Caring for people in their own homes has contributed to fewer hospital-acquired infections, falls and complications. For example, patients with delirium can find admission very distressing, so these patients are cared for much more successfully at home,” according to an NHS case study on a frailty virtual ward in Leeds.
Contact us today at support@blueeye.video to discuss BlueEye virtual ward.