Meet the team: Clayton Cosgrove, Product Manager
What is your job title and how would you describe your role at eConsult?
I am the Product Manager for Ecosystems here at eConsult. My job is to look at how we present our consultation information to our customers and partners, and then how we can interop with other systems our customers use.
I do this across our product portfolio covering Primary Care, Emergency and Urgent Care and Outpatient departments. We have a dedicated Product Manager for this because it’s one of the biggest problems facing our health system at the moment. And it’s quite a complicated thing to resolve.
What have you been working on recently?
We are really excited about what our Smart Inbox can do! But, it needs to share data with other systems that our customers use regularly such as EMIS, SystmOne and Vision. I have changed our ‘save to record’ strategy so that it is more useful for our users.
Gone are the days of just a PDF. Now, we save to record with ‘Ideas, Concerns and Expectations’ as structured free text. We call it ICE but it allows customers to perform better searches in their clinical system.
We’ve just launched that for EMIS and will soon be launching it for SystmOne customers of our Smart Inbox.
We are doing everything we can to help the NHS at all care levels. When our customers give us feedback, we listen and act.
Why would our customers like that?
We are always listening to feedback from our customers, and it’s what they told us would help. Some form of free text saved in the clinical system was a regular comment. So I wanted to look at how we present our consultation data better.
We put the relevant information that an eConsult user wants to see in the clinical record as a quick snapshot. If they need to, they can refer to the complete consultation in the PDF, which is also saved into the record.
We have further plans for this area but all of our user feedback so far shows this is really useful.
What projects at eConsult are you really excited about?
Well, there are two, actually, involving our Urgent and Emergency Care product.
We recently went live at Homerton University Hospital in Hackney, London. There our platform is feeding data into their electronic patient record (EPR) system, Cerner Millennium. This was a mammoth project but the interop standard is really high and the results speak for themselves.
The other exciting interoperability project went live at the start of the year and is in use at University Hospitals Sussex with their EPR, EMIS Symphony. This is another example of how we have built an ultra-high standard of presenting our digital triage data to their triage and reception teams.
I will never get bored of seeing our platform going live in an Emergency Department (ED) where you can physically see the positive effects of digital triage on both patient care and experience, as well as the positive impacts it has on both the clinical and administrative staff in the department.
What do you mean by that?
Our Urgent and Emergency Care product allows patients to check in using a kiosk where they identify who they are, answer Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) questions and then a series of clinical questions to help gather a triage score. We then package up that data and transfer it seamlessly to the hospital’s Patient System and EPR.
The positive effect is that it allows multiple patients to check in at one time, drastically reducing queues out of the door of the Emergency Department and giving early clinical visibility of sick patients to the ED staff. We also hear from reception staff that it makes their experience a lot less stressful, and frees up their time to tackle other work.
What’s the best thing about working at eConsult?
I like that we are doing everything we can to help the NHS at all care levels. When our customers give us feedback, we listen and act.
I’ll never get bored of seeing our platform going live – you can see the positive effects of digital triage on patient care and experience, as well as on the clinical and administrative staff.
I am also lucky that my role is hugely varied. For example on a normal day I might have a meeting about an Urgent Care project, then a Primary Care project and then after that with Deloitte about our AI partnership.
Why does your job title feature Ecosystems?
We have a ‘join the doors’ strategy. Underpinning this is the need to deploy our digital triaging knowledge and expertise in Primary Care, Outpatients and Emergency and Urgent Care environments. In order for that to happen, I need to understand how our solutions work best with the other tools our customers use.
That’s the ‘ecosystems’ part. We know our products don’t work in isolation, but are a vital part of the patient journey and in making sure that data not people move around. We are constantly looking for ways to improve as we are confident that this strategy will help the NHS.
Got a suggestion about our interoperability?
If you have any feedback or suggestions about interoperability between eConsult’s platforms and any other system or software, please do get in touch with us!
Let us know which products you use, what problems you have at the moment and how you think interoperability could help your day-to-day work.