Saving and protecting lives with agile crisis response

Challenge: Fragmented workflows

Guy’s and St Thomas’ relied on a range of spreadsheets and Windows-based files to meet the stringent requirements of the Civil Contingencies Act, but found the method unwieldy and not transparent enough. “During an incident response, we didn’t have good visibility into which parts of the business are affected and how we’re prioritizing our resources to maintain patient care,” says Justin Cuckow, Senior Emergency Planning Officer, Resilience Department at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.

When things go seriously wrong, the international standard for contingency planning and disaster recovery advocates a response with lots of resources, made available to the public within minutes, not days. Guy’s and St Thomas’ must plan responses across 150 departments and instantly enact them, while staying operationally efficient and minimizing downtime.

Guy’s and St Thomas’ wanted a database solution with three core elements: the ability to leverage the enterprise-wide license they already had with K2 Software, support from an in-house development team and integration with Everbridge.

With Nintex K2 Five and Everbridge, Guy’s and St Thomas’ felt that “there was a real opportunity to link two systems, both highly resilient, to transform the way that we deliver business continuity management.”

Guy’s and St Thomas’ wanted to reimagine its overall workflow, remove hurdles and pave the way for 360-degree transparency into the system as a whole. In particular, Guy’s and St Thomas’ needed the ability to quickly see and allocate resources and determine the resulting organization-wide impact.

Solution: Groundbreaking system a pioneer in the U.K.

Working with technology partner, Velocity, Guy’s and St Thomas’ linked the power of Nintex K2 SmartForms with the power of Everbridge’s ER notifications system to create U.K.’s first-ever, end-to-end acute healthcare business continuity management system.

The K2 Software database provides an intuitive, easy-to-navigate environment, tailored for both clinical and non-clinical services. It can now rapidly add in new risks, such as Ebola or an active shooting, and be immediately assured that all departments have action plans.

Nintex K2 SmartForms surfaces all the data in SharePoint, meaning users no longer have to run around and gather data from various portals or log in to different systems. The solution, built by Velocity on Nintex K2 Five, also provides impact analysis and reporting on key metrics and areas so management can focus on further resilience planning, training and investment opportunities.

Drills and training exercises have helped confirm Guy’s and St Thomas’ success. Building this solution with K2 Software and Everbridge saved Guy’s and St Thomas’ incalculable resources and frustration. “If we were to have fiddled around with Windows Workflow, this would have been very difficult, ” says Cuckow.

Now, whether it’s 2:00 a.m. and a Band 6 nurse is responding to a catastrophic or major impact event, or it’s 9:00 a.m. and an executive director is responding to the same alert, there is a consistent response. Plus, clinicians can spend more time delivering care instead of developing emergency response strategies from scratch.

Most importantly, Guy’s and St Thomas’ is spending more time doing what it does best—improving and saving the lives of more than 2 million patients per year.