How Torrejón Hospital implemented AI into their workflow to manage patients remotely
In 2020, the healthcare provider Ribera Salud and Legit.Health started working together in one of the group's hospitals, the Torrejón Hospital, to implement the revolutionary algorithmic technology that, 2 years later, has shown excellent results thanks to the amazing job done by the doctors.
The pandemic could be a blessing in disguise, as it forced the teams to truly push the possibilities of remote care to new heights. In this particular case, the team at Torrejón Hospital needed to follow up on the patient's treatment but could not ensure all of them could go to the medical centre due to COVID-19.
Watch Dr Elena Sanchez Largo's presentation: Artificial Intelligence for Remote Monitoring of Patients With Skin Conditions, where she lays out an overview of how the hospital uses Legit.Health's solution.
Next to Dr Sanchez-Largo, the co-founder of Legit.Health, Taig Mac Carthy, explains some of the key components of the solution, such as the severity measure feature, which automates the filling of scoring systems like PASI or SCORAD.
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It is pretty easy to see how a telematic tool like Legit.Health can help to monitor patients remotely. But, how does it manage not to add to the doctor's workload by making them have to worry about yet another system? Let's find out.
First Step: Patient registration
Implementing a new system into an established workflow is a dreaded task for most people. After all, that workflow has been honed and perfected along with years of adjustment and modifications, and including a new element to it can feel like throwing a wrench into a well-oiled machine.
Thankfully, the process of onboarding new patients is both easy and contained in time, as it only needs to happen once.
Once the doctors at Torrejón Hospital had access to their Legit.Health account (a process that barely takes two minutes) they just needed to, as a part of a visit, ask for the Patient's Name, Surname, Email, or Telephone, and input their Pathology information.
Onboarding
The onboarding process only takes part once for each patient.
This process takes no more than a minute, and it only needs to happen once, but if you want to avoid it completely it is possible to avoid this step altogether thanks to Legit.Health's Dermatology API.
In Torrejón Hospital's case, the patients confirmed their account and logged in with their password on the spot, and were instructed by the doctor to check their email or phones for alerts asking them to take pictures for the monitoring.
In total, both doctors and patients have spent around 5 minutes combined to set up this process. And although at Torrejón Hospital the medical team chose to take this process into their own hands, at other centres they leave the patient registration step in the hands of their non-medical teams.
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Second step: Follow up
Once the system had been set up, each Torrejón Hospital patient began a continuous use loop, where the follow-up and monitorization process gets simplified by the algorithm into a single decision by the doctors.
Each time a patient uploads a picture, either because the doctor had set an upload pattern for them on their last visit or because they felt like their condition has changed significantly, the algorithm processes the information.
After analysing the image, if the algorithms detect an increase in severity or in the suspicion of malignancy or pre-malignancy, it will flag the picture as urgent and show it to the doctor first.
Continuous use
Brief description of what Doctors and Patients do when using Legit.Health
The doctor then can, at any time, review all the pictures sent to them by their patients, being able to set up a face-to-face consultation if they think is necessary or simply send a message to the patients with indications about the treatment and the upload pattern.
This not only takes a minimal amount of work for the doctor for each patient, but in fact increases the efficiency significantly.
Do you want to see the clinical AI technology in action?
The true heroes of the story
The implementation of new technology is most challenging for doctors, as they are already very busy with the clinical workload. Luckily, the great dermatologists at Torrejón are very innovative professionals, who aim at improving their daily practices by finding better ways to care for patients.
The main conclusion here is that technology comes second, and clinical talent comes first. If the medical team is talented and capable, any solution can flourish. And that is precisely what happened when Hospital U. of Torrejón implemented Legit.Health.
The best results we can show you of how this project has worked, are the words of some of the doctors involved:
Dr Elena Sánchez-Largo
The use of applications for telematic follow-up allows the flow of information between doctor and patient without the need for face-to-face consultations, adjusting it to a more real time and allowing changes in the therapeutic attitude more quickly and effectively.
Dr Elena Sánchez-Largo has put Legit.Health to work with her Psoriasis patients at Torrejón Hospital, achieving great results.
She reports that 27% of her patients benefited from an early adjustment to their treatment, all thanks to the improvement in the communication between doctor and patient.
You can follow Elena Sánchez-Largo on twitter
Dr Marta Andreu
This telematic follow-up prevented school absences in paediatric patients, work absences in adults, and allowed the follow-up of patients in quarantine due to COVID-19 or with diseases that make it difficult to travel. Both patients and their dermatologists showed a high degree of satisfaction with the use of the app, with 100% of patients interested in continuing to use the tool.
Dr. Marta Andreu puts into perspective the use of the app at Torrejón hospital, saying it was used in patients of Psoriasis, Atopic Dermatitis, Urticaria, Acne, and Hidradenitis Suppurativa. She highlights the good reception of the app from the patients and how its use improved the satisfaction they had with the medical centre.
You can find Dr. Marta Andreu on LinkedIn.
In future posts, we hope to highlight also the work and talent of their colleagues, such as Dr. Leticia Calzado, Dr. Marta Andreu, Dra. Marta Ruano or Dr. Javier Alcántara, to name a few. Truly highly innovative healthcare professionals who are exploring the best ways of caring for their patients and improving health systems.
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