Customer Stories

Healthcare

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children builds a ‘hospital without walls’ using Zoom & Epic in the NHS

After pivoting to video visits during the pandemic, GOSH is exploring using Zoom to deliver kinder, more connected care for young patients.

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children

Founded: 1852

Location: London, England

Industry: Healthcare

Challenges: Needed to quickly implement video capabilities to continue delivering care to paediatric patients during COVID-19 lockdowns in the U.K., and maintain business continuity for remote and in-person staff members.

Solution: Zoom Meetings, Zoom Webinars, Epic integration

Business benefits: Implemented video-visit capabilities for 5,000 people and fully integrated Zoom into Epic in eight days, which enabled video visits to account for 24% of outpatient appointments in 2020-2021. Used Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars for staff communication, teaching, and training.

We went from a standing start to video visit capabilities for 5,000 people in eight days. At the time, we hadn’t realized we were creating a hospital without walls.

Dr. Shankar Sridharan

Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist & Chief Clinical Information Officer

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children

Founded: 1852

Location: London, England

Industry: Healthcare

Solution: Zoom Meetings, Zoom Webinars, Epic integration

We went from a standing start to video visit capabilities for 5,000 people in eight days. At the time, we hadn’t realized we were creating a hospital without walls.

Dr. Shankar Sridharan

Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist & Chief Clinical Information Officer

Innovation and care happen every day at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust (GOSH) in London, England. GOSH was the first purpose-built children’s hospital in the U.K. and is now one of the most digitally able hospitals in Europe. Known as an international centre of excellence in child healthcare, GOSH is where paediatric patients throughout the U.K. go to receive groundbreaking surgeries, specialised treatment, and critical care in 63 different clinical specialties.

During the pandemic, GOSH leaned into that innovative spirit to create a “hospital without walls,” according to Dr. Shankar Sridharan, consultant paediatric cardiologist and chief clinical information officer at GOSH. The hospital deployed Zoom in eight days to prepare for the pandemic’s surge, which kept its workforce connected and able to deliver care during a global health crisis.

Implementing video-visit capabilities in 8 days

At the beginning of 2020, leaders at GOSH began following news of the COVID-19 outbreak. They knew that the world was changing and that the hospital needed to prepare for an unprecedented situation. As a facility with many critically ill young patients, GOSH moved quickly to stand up a solution that would enable care continuity as seamlessly as possible.

“We had dabbled in using video in the past, but nothing scalable. But in January 2020, we realized we needed to have video-visit capabilities,” Dr. Sridharan said.

In eight days, GOSH was able to deploy video-visit capabilities to 5,000 hospital staff and fully integrate Zoom into its electronic patient record (EPR) system — so the organization was prepared for the inevitable lockdown in March 2020. “Eight weeks later, we had cancelled every in-person appointment and moved completely online, in response to the COVID lockdown,” Dr. Sridharan said.

A seamless patient experience with Epic

GOSH’s EPR system, Epic, fully deployed in 2019, served as the foundation for the organization’s video requirements. “We wanted a video platform that integrated with Epic,” Dr. Sridharan said.

For Dr. Sridharan, evaluating different solutions came down to the quality, safety, security, and usability of the platform.

Zoom’s user experience is seamless. It’s built into our workflow so the doctor knows when the patient is there and vice versa. It’s easy to use and the patient can contact us on any device.

Dr. Shankar Sridharan

Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist & Chief Clinical Information Officer

Zoom’s integration with Epic enabled GOSH to schedule and launch video visits securely and seamlessly within an Epic workflow.

“We cancelled people’s physical appointments and rescheduled them in Epic with video-visit capabilities,” Dr. Sridharan said. “In that way, the link to the visit is through Epic. This gives us trusted access so you’ve got the right doctor contacting the right patient.”

A new way of working

“We were in a scenario where we had cancelled patient appointments, had a workforce where half of them were offsite — how do you continue to deliver care?” Dr. Sridharan asked.

“We had our video-visit capability to continue delivering care to patients, but we also used video for staff meetings — both were fundamental,” he said. “You need to be able to meet to run a hospital. Operationally, it was a godsend for response meetings and departmental meetings.”

Early on, GOSH used Zoom Webinar to create a virtual chief executive update series, which has continued throughout the pandemic. “This was something we had never done before. They’ve become very popular for dissemination of trusted information, to convey confidence, to let people know what’s happening,” Sridharan said.

Zoom continues to be the platform of choice at GOSH for patient-facing clinical meetings (and multidisciplinary team meetings, or MDTs), teaching and training webinars, and international sessions. GOSH even hosted a webinar with doctors from Wuhan, China, where COVID-19 was first reported, to learn about fighting the virus firsthand. “It’s really valuable, as a teaching hospital, to be able to do all this,” Sridharan said.

‘Unpausing life’ for children in the hospital

Dr. Sridharan believes the physical, social, and emotional aspects of connecting via Zoom are just as important, especially for children in isolation and families going through difficult situations.

“Little children quite like eating together, but our patients are in their rooms because they’ve got cancer or their blood count is low. We’d like to create a way so they can eat lunch with each other over Zoom. It will promote wellness and make them feel not as lonely,” he said.

His team is considering how to brighten the lives of young patients who have put a pause on school, activities, and home life during a hospital stay. Dr. Sridharan wants to use Zoom to “unpause life” by allowing children to see and experience their normal environment back home.

“You might have one parent with a sick kid in the hospital and one parent at home with the other children,” he said. “Why can’t we have a portal into that family’s dining room?”

The future of video visits at GOSH

“If there’s one benefit from a crisis, it’s people coming together and taking out obstacles,” Dr. Sridharan said. “We went from a standing start to video-visit capabilities for 5,000 people in eight days. At the time, we hadn’t realised we were creating a ‘hospital without walls.’”

From March 2019 to 2020, fewer than 1% of all outpatient appointments at GOSH were delivered by video. From March 2020 to 2021, 24% of outpatient appointments were being delivered via video. Two-thirds of patients and parents surveyed in the early months of 2021 said they were extremely likely to recommend a virtual visit.

A survey of clinicians found that 95% of clinicians were likely to continue to use video visits after the pandemic. That’s why GOSH is exploring how to go beyond its current video visit capabilities and leverage Zoom in more ways to provide safer, better, and kinder care.

“We would like to do more with multi-party visits through Epic — having an interpreter online at the same time, having two doctors online with a patient, or two family members at different sites,” Dr. Sridharan said.

There isn’t a day I don’t use Google to look something up, and there isn’t a day I don’t use Zoom to communicate. It’s been an incredibly important part of life.

Dr. Shankar Sridharan

Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist & Chief Clinical Information Officer

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