I recently participated in the Parsek led webinar entitled: ‘The joined-up approach: How integrated digital MDT meetings can transform patient care’.
The webinar focused on exchanging best practices and presented new approaches to encourage efficient structures and processes for running remote multi-disciplinary team meetings. This inspired me to share my experiences of how digital MDTs are evolving within the NHS and my thoughts on how they could look going forward.
As discussed in our previous blog, the Covid pandemic pushed health providers to adopt digital services quickly, enabling clinicians to use video conferencing tools in their daily work. We wanted to find out which services clinicians currently use to manage their MDT meetings, so we asked our recent webinar attendees that question.
What was their answer?
Our survey revealed that most respondents, 80%, were using video collaboration, such as MS Teams, Zoom, or Skype, as their primary tool to host regular MDT sessions. As a self-confessed tech geek, it was very encouraging to see the positive steps that the NHS had taken when it came to facilitating remote digital MDT meetings.
However, one of the things I hear when I talk to NHS IT directors and clinicians is: “We don’t need Vitaly; we’ve got Teams.”
There seems to be a misconception about what we do: because the Vitaly solution for multidisciplinary team meetings is not a replacement for Teams – or any other video conferencing setup.
Instead, Vitaly works with Teams (or Webex or Zoom or Google Meet) to make multi-disciplinary team meetings more efficient and address the information governance issues that can arise when people find ad-hoc ways to share documents between participants.
Helping MDT meetings to run better
So, if Vitaly isn’t a replacement for Teams or the other video platform providers, what are we offering? Vitaly Multidisciplinary Team Meetings is a web application that:
- Assigns clear roles to everybody involved in an MDT meeting,
- guides them through the workflow required to refer patients to an MDT,
- collate information,
- chair a quorate meeting,
- and distribute the outcome letter back to the patient record.
The solution makes it easier for care providers to request that one of their patients is discussed at an MDT meeting regardless of their location.
Besides, it enables the clinicians involved to review the information and prepare recommendations in advance, helping them save meeting time for the most complex cases.
It also helps the meeting chair to call in the right expertise for each patient and streamlines the production and distribution of final reports.
Integrated information exchange, saving admin time and reducing manual errors
Vitaly supports tight integration with external IT systems, using international open standards (HL7, FHIR, OpenEHR). It facilitates the exchange of all the documents, scans, and other information required for review and assessment by specialists before and during an MDT meeting.
This avoids the copying and rekeying of documents that can occur when people use ad-hoc, cloud-storage solutions to support MDT meetings; and the information governance, privacy and retention issues that go with that.
Addressing the challenges of ad-hoc approaches
Although I hear: “We don’t need Parsek, we’ve got Teams”, I also hear about a lot of problems with how MDT meetings have evolved in the NHS, and with this kind of ad-hoc approach to technology, issues that our solution efficiently addresses.
For example:
Chief Clinical Information Officers:
“My clinical colleagues have all innovated their own processes for MDT meetings, with varying degrees of success. Now, they want me to find a way forward.”
Our solution addresses this kind of variability. It assigns roles to everybody involved in an MDT meeting, gives them a transparent workflow to follow, and automates the collection of the data required.
Integration with hospital IT systems and video conferencing platforms means clinicians can log in and review patients from the systems they use daily and join an MDT meeting from the application with a single click.
Meeting Co-ordinators:
“The information clinicians require must be collected manually from multiple systems. This is time-consuming and becomes almost impossible when people are working across a cancer network or integrated care system.”
The solution provides digital cross-institutional connections; it can be integrated with NHS Trust IT systems (EPR, PAS, RIS) and health information exchanges or Shared Care records.
This way, it speeds up the transfer of patient documents and imagery from different medical sites, therefore, addressing the problem of inefficient information sharing across institutions.
Clinical Leads:
“I have no way of reviewing cases ahead of an MDT meeting, which is a real problem as we often have too many patients to discuss, and there isn’t enough time to consider each one. Also, we might not have all the information we need.”
The solution provides access to all consultation material and case-specific documentation to all MDT members ahead of the meeting, along with the option to share recommendations in advance.
It also enables the possibility of prioritising cases that require immediate attention and reducing re-discussions of the same patients as a result of greater efficiency of MDT discussions and digital information exchange.
The solution’s tight integration with Trust networks and ICS IT systems make it easier to ensure that the correct information is available to inform discussions that lead to optimal treatment decisions and – what we are all striving to achieve – the best possible patient outcomes.
Aim higher than online facilitation
Facilitation of MDTs by using digital video collaboration tools is the first step towards the digital transformation of MDT meetings.
The second step to address this is to tackle the redundant tactics in organising them and reduce burdensome processes that make them inefficient.
I believe that the cancer backlog, NHS workforce crisis and unnecessary use of clinical time are arguments strong enough to aim higher than just online facilitation.
If you’d like to watch the discussion of the webinar: ‘The joined-up approach: How integrated digital MDT meetings can transform patient care,’ click here.
I’ll be happy to demonstrate in detail how our Vitaly solution works in practice. For a more detailed discussion, don’t hesitate to reach out by sending us an email at sales@parsek.com.
Zan Virtnik, UK Market Lead
“Enthusiast about digital transformation in healthcare, who believes the right approach to the adoption of digital healthcare lies in collaboration, persistence and trusted partnerships among people who want to achieve an impactful change.”