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Bayer Digital Healthcare UKI, in collaboration with Cognitant, has launched its first digital affected person assist bundle, My Kidney Assistant, designed to offer sort 2 diabetes (T2D) sufferers with the knowledge and assets to assist monitor and enhance their kidney well being.
Co-founder and CEO of affected person engagement specialist Cognitant, Dr Tim Ringrose, spoke solely to Digital Well being Information concerning the firm’s involvement within the challenge and the influence it is going to have on sufferers and clinicians.
The brand new digital affected person assist bundle gives T2D sufferers with entry to personalised well being data and knowledge recording options, designed to assist self-management of persistent kidney illness (CKD) or to scale back their threat of creating CKD.
My Kidney Assistant, created by Bayer Digital Healthcare UKI with Cognitant and assist from native healthcare professionals and sufferers teams and Royal Berkshire NHS Basis Belief, hosts curated, interactive, multimedia content material to assist the making of wholesome life-style choices.
As well as, the digital platform permits customers to log well being knowledge (blood strain, ldl cholesterol, blood sugar), check outcomes (urine, kidney operate), and medicine adherence. It permits the setting of non-public objectives (together with weight reduction, exercise ranges, and alcohol discount) and delivers medicine adherence reminders.
“The motivation for this was to tackle the fact that there’s a huge and growing number of patients with type two diabetes, and 40% of those of patients are at risk of developing significant kidney disease,” Ringrose defined.
“So we need to need to diagnose patients early, identify them early and provide them with the right tools to help them to reduce their risk of having significant kidney problems, because left untreated, their kidney problems will regress.”
Advantages for sufferers and clinicians
The know-how gives key advantages for each T2D sufferers and clinicians. For sufferers, “the benefit is understanding more about their health and their condition” and having the ability to “understand how diabetes affects other organs” and “how this is something they can control,” Ringrose stated.
On advantages for clinicians, he stated: “We all know how overwhelmed the health service is, there just isn’t time at the moment for clinicians to invest the time required to explain to patients about what’s going on and what’s happening.
“A nephrologist said to me that GPs are actually spending less time on managing long term conditions than they have done previously, simply because they’re weighting it up; I could spend 20 minutes talking to the patient, and explaining to them all about their type two diabetes and how they can reduce the risk of complications, or at the same time, I could see three patients that have an acute problem that I can just deal with quickly.
“What we’re providing is a tool that means that the clinician doesn’t have to make that choice; they can say to a patient you’ve got type two diabetes, and the recent urine tests have shown that you’ve got some protein in there, which is an early sign of kidney damage, I’m going to send you a link to this so that you can understand what that means and what you can do about it. It’s a tool that will help to save clinical time.”
Challenges with implementation
Ringrose highlighted the struggles with introducing new know-how into the NHS. “Naturally, the NHS is interested in introducing innovations that will have a long term impact,” he stated.
“But when it comes down to sitting down with someone, and them agreeing to implement something, because of the pressures and the fact that the NHS works on an annual cycle, people are generally looking for much more short term savings and benefits from introducing technology.
“So I think our biggest challenge, really, is convincing the decision makers in integrated care systems that adopting this technology will not only be great in the long term but will also be a great benefit in the short term,” he added.
Elsewhere at Cognitant
The Cognitant CEO highlighted another work the corporate is doing, together with a stroke programme already in place at University College London Hospitals NHS Trust (UCLH) with SBRI funding.
Ringrose confirmed this programme has gone by means of its first analysis and is now being rolled out to a different 4 hyper acute stroke centres, having obtained “great feedback from patients and carers”.
“What we’re aiming to do is get patients out of hospital sooner, but getting them safely discharged so they, their carers and their family know what’s happened, know how they can really maximise recovery and reduce the risk that they will have another complication,” he stated.
Ringrose stated Cognitant can also be engaged on some programmes with Portsmouth round bronchial asthma and produce other programmes and growth for kids with allergy symptoms, involving instructing them tips on how to use the self-injector and adrenaline pump.
“Our model is to build something with one centre, and then test it, evaluate it and roll it out as far as possible across the NHS, and hopefully in due course into international markets.”
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