The challenge
If you’re given an injection, in hospital, anywhere in the NHS, there’s a strong likelihood that the person injecting you will use the IMG – the Injectable Medicines Guide.
It’s how they know all the vital information about the drug they’re administering; from the best injection site, to how much to give you, medicine interactions, and more. And it’s used millions of times a week.
With guidelines changing regularly – and with vital patient safety at stake – the IMG has to be easy to use, exceptionally clear, and simple yet secure to update. But how best to do this digitally?
The existing website was starting to show its age. So, it was time for the IMG to have a radical digital overhaul. Although it had been built and long-maintained by an in-house team, the decision was made to put it out to tender, via the government’s Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework.
The project journey
Having won the tender, our first job was to get ourselves to hospital and watch the IMG in action.
The question of usability is one we take very seriously. Many of our projects deal with secure data for time-poor users, often in fairly stressful environments and as part of specialist roles.
We knew that although some IMG users would be administering the same drug multiple times a day, and know it inside out, the system has to be robust enough for much less comfortable environments.
It could be used by a nurse who’s never worked on that ward before, by a nurse who might be less technically adept than other colleagues, or by a tired nurse, working as part of a crash team, under pressure at 5am.
And when you take into account that, if the NHS trust has subscribed to the IMG, every ward from A&E to urology, and from obstetrics and gynaecology to geriatric will need access to it, it has to be clear and easy enough to use in the most varied and tricky of situations.
So we took to St James’ Hospital in Leeds for deep user research, watching and talking to the nurses who were actually using it. It was an eye-opener, showing us first-hand the difficulties they face, from department to department. Challenges that will be replicated and multiplied in NHS trusts all over the country.
That process meant we were not only able to pinpoint numerous additional improvements, but also take our direct findings back to NHS leaders and prove the validity of our recommendations, as witnessed on the frontline.
Once we’d refined and agreed our approach, we spent around a year building the system. Then it was time to migrate the information from the old website to our new, more modern and usable format. And add thoughtful, user-friendly touches, such as printable posters with QR codes, for medics to attach to the medicine cupboard, providing easy mobile access to the IMG exactly when and where it’s needed.
The impact
Feedback from acceptance testing has been extremely positive: Nurses love the clearer interface and easier ways to access the application, and the wider IMG team really appreciate the improved editing process, with a more intuitive interface and robust, built-in audit trails.
Happy with the initial test results, the time was right to go live. We were confident that the new IMG could be rolled-out seamlessly, and we weren't wrong. A carefully planned staff onboarding process, followed by a two month window of parallel running allowed Trusts to switch at a time that suited them. Once all Trusts had successfully switched across, the old service was safely retired, with the new application delivering over a million pieces of vital information every month.
Our ongoing relationship with the NHS and IMG includes plans to further improve the service, saving the NHS vast amounts of time and making nurses’ lives that little bit easier.
Case study
Bringing a fresh Perspective to essential pension industry data
Pendragon, a specialist provider of legal and regulatory information services to the UK pensions industry, is rightly proud of its flagship product, Perspective. But this indispensable electronic information service was showing its age – and resisting attempts to drag it up to date.
To hang on to its position, cloud-based convenience was a must. But two previous attempts to shift it from desktop to SaaS had failed for being too slow. How could we overcome the technical barriers to bring Perspective up to date without losing performance?
Get in touch
We craft trailored solutions for unique challenges, not off-the-shelf or one-size-fits-all. We thrive on finding beautiful answers to complex challenges, using our experience and expertise to create results you can rely on.
The Isotoma way
Teamwork is at the heart of everything we do - trusting our people has always been one of our key values. With mixed-function development teams, we run our projects along agile lines.
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