How Digital Innovation Strengthens B. Braun Strategic Partnerships

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How Digital Innovation Strengthens B. Braun Strategic Partnerships

A key aim of B. Braun Strategic Partnerships is to support the healthcare sector to address challenges through creating digitally innovative pathways.

Increasingly, data has provided key insights into the challenges that the healthcare sector faces. Workforce and bed shortages, infection rates and changing tariffs put significant pressure on the healthcare system. B. Braun Strategic Partnerships leverage Hospital Episode Statistic data to analyse current pathways of care at a national, provider trust and hospital level before identifying where cost and efficiency savings can be made.

Digitisation assists in streamlining pathways of care; enabling patients to return home sooner after surgery, reducing readmissions and outpatient appointments, and empowering patients to take control of their own recovery and rehabilitation. Digital innovation was utilised in the transformation of the patient pathway following orthopaedic joint replacement in B. Braun’s Orthopaedic Pathway.

The Orthopaedic Pathway was created to address the multiple issues requiring attention within the standard orthopaedic pathway, including long length of stay, suboptimal outcomes and patient satisfaction scores. Tariff changes have also changed to incentivise hospitals to treat patients remotely. The pathway leverages digital innovation through a Range of Motion (ROM) sensor and a downloadable app for the patient’s smartphone or tablet to enhance the patient’s pre-habilitiation and rehabilitation.

The app provides the patient with a digital platform allowing them to perform ROM tests, track their progress, log pain and remain in contact with the hospital via a messaging function, reducing the need for outpatient and community physiotherapy appointments. The data is then transmitted back to the hospital for the clinician to analyse and act appropriately.

The communication channel with the hospital provides patients with support in their home environment, placing them at ease after same day discharge post-surgery. Through the increased involvement in their own recovery, patients are empowered to carry out their flexion and extension exercises and in turn, accelerate their rehabilitation.

Digitising rehabilitation within the orthopaedic pathway has been invaluable to Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust. Graham Walsh, Consultant Orthopaedic surgeon and Chief Clinical Information Officer at the trust has worked closely with B. Braun on the Orthopaedic Pathway over the past 12 months.

“Patient wearable technology was something that was of great interest to us, we saw it as an enabler to get patients home on the same day, and also to improve patient satisfaction. What we discovered was that although digital technology is often seen as something that distances the patient from healthcare [as they are able to return home], we found that actually the wearables brought the patient in and they felt increasingly part of their journey.

They were able to communicate with the physios which we found invaluable, the patients were able to monitor how their progress was doing once they were discharged, which is something quite novel and something that we hadn’t seen before. All those things meant that the patient felt closer to the treatment.”

Both in the healthcare industry and within B. Braun, digitisation is a growing influence, enabling us to understand and create solutions through increasingly innovative pathways. Through leveraging our competency of continuous improvement and efficiency, B. Braun are able to work alongside our customers to create tailored and innovative solutions to overcome key healthcare challenges.