Scotland’s largest health and social care conference ‘Digital Health and Care Fest’ was held on 20th and 21st November 2019 at the University of Strathclyde Technology and Innovation Centre in Glasgow in partnership with Scottish Government, NHS and the Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland (CCPS). The two day event showcased the very best of digital innovation in health and social care encouraging strong debate amongst key national digital strategy colleagues from Scottish Government, the NHS, academia, industry and the care and support sector.
We were delighted to see the trend continue from the last few years, with a significant number of Flo enabled showcases at the event, ranging from innovative evaluation studies through to deployment of digital health (Flo) at scale across multiple Healthboards and diverse teams.
We were delighted to see that amongst the shortlisted evaluation case studies to be judged by the event panel, 25% were based on Flo’s unique abilities to enable the attainment of better and faster outcomes. The abundance of robust, independent evidence of clinical acceptance, improved patient outcomes, improved access to care and improved patient engagement and adherence with self management speaks for itself.
Special congratulations to winner, Mary Paterson, who on behalf of the Scale-Up BP Team accepted the winning accolade with their presentation of the impact across 3200 patients from ‘Introducing Telemonitoring for Blood Pressure into Routine General Practice at Scale: An Implementation Study’ in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh. The results described how, compared with the previous year, the participating practices:
- made 18.9% fewer face-to-face appointments for any reason
- patients mean systolic BP fell by 6.55mmHg
- patients mean diastolic BP fell by 4.23mmHg
- patients whose baseline systolic was >135mmHg had a mean fall in BP of 15.1mmHg
The evidence from this study contributed to the Scottish Government’s recent £1.2million commitment to support Scottish Health Boards to move to large scale deployment and mainstream the delivery of remote patient monitoring within primary care services with Florence, read more here.
Scale-Up BP is part of the wider Technology Enabled Care (TEC) Programme established in Scotland in 2015/16 and to date, more than 150 practices recruited Flo to support their patients requiring blood pressure monitoring either to diagnose hypertension, monitor BP or titrate medication, with over 10,000 patients benefiting.
A notable point on the use of Flo’s unique psychological techniques, is the very low dropout rate, which was less than 9% over the length of the study, something we’ve found simply isn’t achievable when using other methods or apps.
- Other shortlisted Florence based studies included;
- Cost avoidance achieved with Hypertension monitoring
- Using lifestyle interventions to lower blood pressure
- Highest success rate in Scotland for Beating the Blues CBT completion
The prestigious UK General Practice Awards were held on 29th November 2019 at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge, London. The awards are held to recognise the very best of general practice and we are again delighted to share that the ‘Clinical Improvement Award: Public Health and Prevention’ was won on the night by the Scale-Up BP Team led by Prof Brian McKinstry. This fabulous at scale achievement in digital healthcare with Florence was a well deserved recognition for all involved.
The sixth annual Scottish Public Service Awards took place on 4th December 2019 celebrating excellence within Scotland’s public services, and showcasing some of the most innovative and outstanding work being achieved. We are excited to share that the winners of the ‘Digital Public Services Award’ were the NSS Integration Team, with their work on ‘Remote Blood Pressure Monitoring’. We worked with the NSS Integration Team to implement Flo’s GDPR compliant APIs to allow routine blood pressure data from individual GP Practices to be extracted and analysed in the NSS safe Haven.